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So, I'm standing by a train station in a very small town in Japan, minding my own business waiting for the train, as you do. A couple of girls walk into the station, then walk out again, and then sloooowly make their way towards me and then...
the short one stands right close to me, picks up my hand and starts to stroke it! No word of a lie. I gently move away and she just follows me, and then I ask "ちょっと、何しているか” (excuse me, but what the hell are you doing?), to which she replied "すごい なあ！” (so cool!). She continued to stroke my hand for a while, as I tried to figure out what was going on.
The two girls turned out to be high school students of one of my JET friends, who were very curious about black people and I assume, wanted to know what their skin felt like. We talked for a while until the train came, and then we parted.
Strangely enough, this wasn't the first time a Japanese lady felt the urge to stroke my skin. While sitting at a bar with a JET friend of mine in Takaoka (the bar was intelligently named "The Foolish"), the bar maid, as curious and bored as bar maids get, decided to stroke my hand. "Does it come off?" she asked. "Does what come off?" I said. "The black". So she honestly thought that it would like, come off in the bath or something. "No, no. That's...just me." There was only one other time in my life I had heard of the question. One of the old people at the church I used to go to in Slough (near London in the UK) got asked that question way back around 1970, when people tried to actually rub the black off his skin. What do you do in a situation like that? As the bar made was not that bad looking, I just took it in my stride.
 Takaoka, had a population of about 170,000 people, most of them Japanese and in the whole year that I lived there, I saw about two other black guys, one of them from a distance, so I can't actually be sure. So chances are, I was the first black person these Japanese people, both the girls at the train station and the bar maid, had talked to, maybe seen in real life, and most likely the first black person they had ever touched. I was a walking, living education for the people of Takaoka. I guess that was part of the reason I was hired to teach in that city.
I guess I should have been privileged. I guess I was in a way, but at the time, I did find it very strange. Very strange indeed.
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