A foreigner's love of Japan is rarely reciprocated, asserts journalist Shapiro after five years spent there, beginning in 1984, with his wife Susan Chira, a New York Times reporter. The author offers not only his own acute observations and those of Lafcadio Hearn, extensively cited, but reports the firsthand experiences of five American residents--a Japanese baseball team member, a businessman, a missionary couple and a defiant English teacher, who faced prison rather than be fingerprinted. Shapiro recreates revealing episodes in which, with only partial success, these expatriates sought acceptance by a remote, highly conformist, unpredictable people whose xenophobia extends to other Asiatics and to Japanese who have lived abroad.
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