An Alien by All Accounts

AKA: I've effectively been called a monster, and I can't even get mad about it.

Every foreigner in Japan has had it happen. You see a small child staring at you on the train or in a store; you smile and say "hello" in Japanese. The child's eyes go wide in shock. You begin to pray that it won't happen, not again, but it's too late - the child begins crying, scared witless, while his/her parent consoles him/her, occasionally giving you an apologetic look. Yet again, you've scared a child senseless with a wave and a greeting.

By the time they're first or second graders, Japanese children seem to be over this phenomenon. However, if a foreigner happens across a child who looks as though he/she may not yet be in school, said foreigner has to be rather careful in interacting with said child. Now, I have to tell you that this is insanely hard for me. In America, it's common to play* with a baby that's looking at you, even if you're a complete stranger; I'm somewhat trained to smile, wave, and baby-talk at children with whom I make eye contact. On top of this, Japanese children are easily 100 times cuter than American babies, thereby making the aforementioned interacting seem all the more appealing.
In Japan, this kind of interaction between children and strangers is much, much less common. Not only that, but you're a foreigner; it certainly adds to your strangeness and your scare factor.

Surely, being a foreigner isn't that scary to a small child, you may be thinking. It's a social phenomenon that makes foreigners "outsiders," not an innate system. Tabula rasa, Leslie!

Well...not quite.

Developmental psychology has studied the way that newborns and young children identify and differentiate people's faces (Babies have rather poor eyesight.) One study used sensors to trace where the children look while viewing a face - they tended to follow the outline of the face and then focus in on the eyes and mouth. This makes sense - these things are good, general indicators of the object being a human, as well as being good markers for identifying whose face it might be.

Now, people of different ethnicities have different facial structures, as well as different points of reference for differentiating between people. Anyone who says "I just can't tell Asians / African-Americans / Whites / etc. apart!" is suffering from an inability to identify these points of reference. I'll go on ahead and say that Japanese people look very similar to me; I can tell them apart, but not as easily as I can with people from my own ethnicity.

Now, take babies in Japan. They've been introduced almost exclusively to their own ethnicity due to the minimal number of other ethnicities in the country. They are also very aware of the facial markers for their own ethnicity.
Suddenly, they see a creature - the face is bizarre; its features, on the whole, are wrong. And then this monster speaks to you ... in your own language.
As someone in my town said, "It'd be a lot like an alien walking up to you and saying, 'Hey, how's it going?' instead of speaking in blips and clicks."


So, moral of the story, foreigners: adorable Japanese babies think you're scary as hell. (Get used to it!)




* By which I mean "interact in a platonic manner" - pedophiles and other seedy types aren't generally encouraged. Get your mind out of the gutter.