Japan is a very attractive country. Even as a Japanese, I truly think it’s a beautiful country. Through various media, like social media and movies, Japan has been introduced to the people around the world. I was imagining that the people overseas were thinking Japan as a country of anime and samurai, since those are topics I thought would stand out for the people. It was actually the cleanliness and the shrines that amazed the people. When I talked with a Mexican who came to the convinience store I work at, he said that he was quite surprised by how clean the toilets were. I could totally agree with him: the toliets in the States were a disaster. When I went to the school trip to Kyoto when I was in middle school, I met a group of Americans and guided them to the temple they wanted to see. They said that they were interested in Japanese temples, since they were quite unique and beautiful. I thought that those things are what Japanese people take for granted, and we tend to forget how precious those things are, because they are closely related to our daily lives.

However, there could also be a gap between the image the people have against Japan and the actual features of Japan. One of my favorite movie is “Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift,” but “Japan/Tokyo” in the movie is not accurate. The school lunch the main character ate with his classmates were quite American: in a buffet style, and eating in a cafeteria. There was a sumo wrestler with tatoos in a sentou, a public bath, which I felt is quite odd. Sumo wrestlers don’t have tatoos on their bodies, and people with tatoos can’t enter the public bath. Bringing out this film as an example is not the best choice, but I do think there are cases where there is a gap between people’s image and reality. I watched this film for the  first time when I was 9 years old, but these scenes made me realize that common sense in a certain culture could be difficult to understand for the people outside of it.