I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the phrase “Japanese people are all crazy!”.

I will tell you some of them:

- Oca, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo: I was at the impressive “Bodies: The Exhibition” exhibition – in which human corpses with plasticized organs and muscles are on display – when I noticed a couple of Nikkei visitors fighting among themselves.

Very angry with his wife, the man wouldn't give up the dish the two had planned to eat that night: sashimi .

Averse to the idea of ​​eating raw meat, immediately after seeing so much “raw” meat at the exhibition, the woman begged her husband to change his mind.

When the two left, one of the museum security guards who heard the whole conversation said to his colleague: “Hey, Japanese people are crazy, right?”

- Swimming pool at a club in the city of Matão, in the interior of São Paulo: after the barbecue, all the children went straight to the pool. Only me, my cousin and a girl, the only Nikkei in the class, were forced by our parents to wait, not just one, but two hours for this.

Annoyed by the situation, this cousin of mine sat down on a plastic lounger and commented to himself: “Yeah... Japanese people are all crazy, really!”

- My living room, in some corner of Liberdade, São Paulo: my girlfriend, after finding out on television that Japanese fans collected their own trash from the stands after their team's games at the 2014 World Cup, asked herself: “Huh? Wow... What's crazy?”

- School supplies store on Rua Bueno de Andrade, Liberdade: a friend of mine, who is not Nikkei, when he learned that the golden manekineko displayed in the window – a plastic cat thirty centimeters tall that swung its raised arm forward and back and forth –, it was used to bring good luck to the store owner, he couldn’t stand it and said to me, laughing: “That’s crazy because it’s Japanese, right?”

- House where I lived for twenty years in Matão, in the interior of São Paulo: my parents were curious about the fact that some of their chopsticks had one of the ends burned.

The mystery was only revealed when our new cook confessed that she was using the “sticks” to light the oven on the stove.

And when I explained to her what those sticks were for, she didn't say anything; but it was written all over his face: “Oh, my Holy Father, the Japanese people are all crazy, that’s it!”

- My kitchen, in my apartment in Liberdade: a colleague – who is also not Nikkei – visited me when I was having dinner. Curious, I wanted to know what that yellow thing I was eating was.

When I explained to her that the yellow thing I was eating was raw egg mixed with rice, she looked at me and said: “ARGH! Why are you doing this?”

So I explained to him that “this” is a typical Japanese dish. And that the raw egg is mixed with rice at high temperature and, at the end, everything is seasoned with soy sauce . A true delight.

She wrinkled her nose: “God, man, that’s crazy, huh!?!”

But, despite all these examples I just mentioned, the most frequent reason why someone tells me that “Japanese people are all crazy” is when the idea is raised – false, in fact; and I myself serve as a bad example – that every Japanese person spends the whole day studying.

© Hudson Okada