joejones

That's a great line and a very good way of thinking about it.

This discussion reminds me of an American guy who I used to work with in Tokyo -- he moved here from Germany, where he lived for several years and had learned the language pretty well. I asked him what life in Frankfurt was like and he complained about how he was constantly being watched by his neighbors and chided every time his house wasn't in order or his garbage wasn't properly disposed of. For this guy, Tokyo was a sort of oasis from that minor hell, amusing as it might sound to those who see Japan as the exact same minor hell.

Taiwaned: not to criticize you, but you sound really self-conscious based on what you post on FT. I recall you worrying in another thread about having ID that would make you seem to be Japanese, while in this thread it almost sounds like you are having trouble not seeming foreign enough. Self-consciousness is a very good trait to have here, inasmuch as some people come to this country and never bother to learn where the noses are (to misappropriate hailstorm's expression). The key is to learn about others' expectations and not to let the self-consciousness overpower you on a day-to-day basis.

All that said, when you talked about that incident where someone thought you were mentally disabled, two things came to my mind:

1) That lady was really rude to say anything like that within earshot of you, and

2) If I saw someone babbling to themselves out loud in broken Japanese in the middle of the street, I would probably also assume that they had a mental problem.

It sounded more funny than anything, actually. In fact, I recall a Seinfeld episode where Kramer was shot up with Novocaine at the dentist and then met a lady on the street who assumed that he was disabled because he couldn't speak properly...

Anyway, not taking yourself too seriously can do wonders for your sanity. I speak from first-hand experience here. Mind your manners but don't be surprised when you make mistakes and either look stupid or have to apologize to people...

On that point, another thing I picked up a long time ago is that apologies go a long way even if you didn't really do anything wrong in your own view. Many people here say sumimasen reflexively, and it does wonders to defuse stand-offs, particularly if you follow up with a token gift or gesture of some kind to make the other person feel obliged to be nice to you in the future. If that doesn't have a positive effect, then they're an insufferable sociopath and you are just out of luck.

Besides that, don't worry about "uchi-soto" and all the other sociological revelations about Japan that are floating around; I find that these concepts can seem true on their face in certain contexts but break down in other contexts, and are anyway not fundamentally different from practices you can see in other societies and cultures. Japanese people have very diverse views of the world, and it irritates me to no end when people speak as if there is one social/cultural gestalt defining how they think and react. Hence my dismissive comment above. Far better to try to get an idea of what reasonable concerns the individuals around you would have...