Are they Japanese?

ok, I'm killing time. I misread my schedule and came to work early.

My job is to talk to people. Sometimes it's about grammar, other times current events, movies, you name it. Often we just trade stories about what's hapened recently in our lives. Someone saw a movie, someone bought a new bicycle.

I told a story about how my neighbors piled thier garbage in front of my parking spot and I couldn't get my car out. It happens almost every week. I don't take it personally, I don't think it has anything to do with me being an "outsider" or any crap like that. I just think humans everywhere are big monkeys and at 7am in their pajams they want to drop the bag of garbage and get out of there as quickly as possible.

So first off, most people I mention this to can't believe my story at all. Like it couldn't happen.

So once I took a photo. I'll have to upload it later.


(That's my car, silver and towards the left. To make it even funnier, to the right of the trash pile is about 5m of open space.)

Then once people see the photo a few will ask "Are they Japanese?"

Like I've said, I live a little bit in the sticks. It's a small city. There aren't any non-japanese at all in my neighborhood. I go to the supermarket, hardware store, even the mall and won't see one. There aren't many in the entire city. But people seriously need to ask if the dozens of bags piled on the street in front of my house on garbage day (in a Japanese city) were left there by people from another country.

I mean, even in a place like New York or Toronto, with so many people from all corners of the globe, would it occur to anyone to ask "Are they Canadian?" They really need to ask this. It's a telling question. They can't believe that a Japanese person would be careless with thier household waste. I've had the same reaction from people every time. Not everyone in the room asks, but around 1 in 3.