"Foreigners Try to Melt an Inhospitable Japanese City," by James Brooke, New York Times, 12 May, p. A4.

Globalization is encroaching on inner Japan, or those small cities far from the maddening crowds of sophisticated Tokyo. And it is scaring the locals to the point of demanding separate seating areas in restaurants, separate sauna facilities, etc. ìJapanese onlyî signs abound, and local police set up ìsnitch sitesî where locals can report suspicious foreign behavior online, such as causing ìanxietyî in your neighborhood.

Since Russians constitute a good portion of such foreigners, especially in the north, there is a special variant of ìstay outî signs that read, ìNo gangsters allowed in this place.î As for tourists, one local governor had to apologize recently for calling them ìsneaky thievesî in public.

As Japan ages dramatically in coming years and is forced to import more and more non-Japanese labor, this still hermetic society is going to change quite profoundly. I felt myself lucky to have lived briefly in Soviet Russia in the mid-1980s. I think anyone who wants to see the ìrealî Japan before its gets its globalization make-over better move quickly, because the biological clock is ticking.