It's depressing, I must confess.
For more than 40 years, I've been writing about Japan and the Japanese — and a few other countries and nationalities thrown in for good measure — and I'm sometimes rudely reminded of the fact that many people around the globe harbor inane and unreasonable stereotypes about people in other ethnic, racial or religious groups.
The most recent reminder of this came from a barber in Sydney, a Korean-born woman in her mid-twenties. I mentioned to her, as one does, that I was flying to Tokyo that evening.