Diana returned from her pulmonary function testing conference late last night. She didn’t have a terrible time, but I could tell the highlight for her was a stop she and her friends made at a Coach outlet store, rather than the conference itself. She described it as a madhouse - crowds of people (many of them Japanese tourists), staff scrambling to keep the disheveled stock in order, customers asking each other where they found that purse. I asked her if it matched the cliche image of a horde of women fighting over a clearance table. “No,” she said, “but my friend did get pushed once.”

“Wait a second,” I said, “she wasn’t pushed by an elderly Japanese woman, was she?” She was.

I’m reluctant to stereotype, but this is something several friends and I have noticed about older Japanese. A few weeks into my exchange trip there in 2002, several students reported incidents of getting elbowed aside (in my case, by a lady I didn’t even see beforehand). The culprits were both male and female, but always over 50. They never actually hurt their “victims”, but they were always spectacularly rude.

I don’t think it’s resentment toward gaijin, I’ve heard Japanese students mention the same thing. And besides, while they’re arguably entitled when US citizens are on Japanese soil, why do it over here? Are we supposed to “respect our elders” and get out of the way or something?