Let’s be honest; there are a lot of distinctly average-looking foreign guys living in Japan dating jaw-droppingly beautiful Japanese girls. We’ve all witnessed it- a woman who could play the female lead in the next
James Bond movie, walking down the street with a guy who, if we searched for him in the same movie’s end credits, would more likely appear as something along the lines of “man in post office # 3”.
Were the same couple to be seen out and about in the guy’s home town, pretty much everyone would be looking from her to him, then back to her again and whispering to their friends “Wow, that guy’s punching above his weight….”
Shallow? Yes. Narrow minded? Definitely. But no matter how much we remind ourselves that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, there’s no denying the fact that human beings, flawed as we are, make a lot of decisions based on appearances. And when Johnny Average gets to date Princess Zelda (I’m a nerd, remember?), heads turn.
How do they do it?
Rather than ask my wife (a native Japanese lady and, yes, far too pretty for me) and risk alerting her to the fact that she might have done better, I took my question to a higher power- the internet.
After a little bit of poking around, I came upon an incredibly interesting article on
Madame Riri, a Japanese-run website that analyses all-things-Japan from an outside perspective, titled “7 Reasons Why Foreign Men in Japan are Such a Hit with the Ladies”.
Continued