Love being a "foreigner" in Myanmar, hate being one in Japan

Friends I made at Mahabandoola Garden in Yangon

I am 12 days into a long business trip to Yangon, Myanmar. I have been living in a hotel. On the weekdays I am in the company of my work colleagues but on the weekend I can find myself alone for over 24 hours. As a father of three young kids living in an overcrowded apartment in Japan,  I am not used to having so much time alone. Although it can be nice to wake up at my leisure, as the day goes on I usually start to feel the need to talk to one. Near my hotel in Yangon is the Mahabandoola Garden, a very well maintained park in a city whose mouldy European colonial style buildings cry for maintenance. The reason why I do there is that I know that if I sit down on the grass, someone will likely come and talk to me. Today, I young man who I will call Stanley approached me and asked if he could practice his English. He wanted to attend a US university and said he was always looking for foreigners to talk to. With me, he got to practice his English and I got to ask him questions about Myanmar and his English learning experience. Stanley is from the Shan state, his father is Shan and his mother is Lahu. He spoke Lahu wit his mother and siblings but preferred to speak Burmese with his father rather than Shan. He now regrets this. Three of his friends joined us and I heard more interesting stories about the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual nature of Burmese identity. They also told me about their English education, which, given the nature of my mission here, is necessary information.

After talking to these wonderful young people, I started to think about similar experiences I have had in Japan: Japanese people I do not know or barely know approaching me to practice their English. I know that their intentions are the same as the Myanmar people I met in Mahabandoola Garden. I am always polite and cordial but not very friendly to people who do this. To be completely honest, I absolutely detest when people I do not know in Japan or acquaintances I do not know very well approach me to practice their English. Why? I know why now. In Myanmar, I am a foreigner, I do not understand any Burmese and will probably never know more than a few words or phrases. I don't mind that people approach me and tell me directly state that they want to practice English with a foreigner because I do not live here and even the most routine tasks such as ordering a bowl of noodles is a challenge for me. On the other hand, I have lived in Japan for 16 years and have made a fairly substantial effort to learn the language. I live apart from my family and friends in the US and it is not for the sake of being a "foreigner" in a "foreign land." I dislike being called a foreigner because Japan is my second home. I want to be accepted as a functioning member of society and not as a conversation partner. I know I am not "Japanese" but I do not feel like a foreigner either. What should I be called? I don't know, but in Japan, I am not the person who I was in Mahabandoola Park. 

I will end by saying that if I were in the shoes of the Japanese people who try to speak English to me, I would probably do the same thing as an enthusiastic language learner. I also understand there are (American/European) non-Japanese in Japan who have lived there longer than me who chose not to learn the language. I think that people who want to practice their English or other foreign language in Japan have to judge on a case by case basis whether or not it is appropriate.  

Cops and Foreigners in Japan

This morning I became very bothered by an e-mail I read. The e-mail came from David Arudou, a naturalized Japanese citizen who is active in defending the rights of non-Japanese residing in Japan or Japanese citizens who are of a different ethnicity. In the e-mail, he shared the following article in which a Japanese woman was mistaken for a South East Asian woman and arrested and detained for 14 hours for refusing to show the police her passport.
This reminded me of an experience I had with the police last December 27. I was driving from the city of Morioka, where I live, to the city of Hachinohe in Aomori prefecture with my 1 year-old son and wife. We were going to Hachinohe to take the ferry to the Island of Hokkaido where my wife's family lived. The drive to Hachinohe was about 150 kilometers. Usually we take the highway and it takes us about 2 hours. Our ferry was to leave at 7AM on December 27 and up until then we had had about 3 days of constant snow fall. The major highway was closed so we left our house at 2:30 AM and took the back roads to Hachinohe. At about 5 AM we were passing through the outskirts of a small city called Ichinohe. We were hungry so we stopped at a convenience store to get breakfast. One thing that really impressed me when I first came to Japan was how polite convenience store clerks were. When you enter the convenience store you are usaully greeted with an "irasshaimase" which means something close to "welcome" and after buying something the store clerk will thank you. When I entered this convenience store the clerk was very quiet and seemed to avoid looking me in the eye. It did not bother me because I was with my one-year old son and had my hands full as I was trying to let him walk around the convenience store to stretch his legs while prevent him from touching the convenience store merchandise.
We bought our breakfast and ate it in the car outside the convenience store. While we were eating, a police car drove by us in the parking lot. The car was moving at an extremely slow speed and I noticed that the two policeman were looking right at me. They stopped, backed up and parked their car. They came to my car and shined their flashlights at me and knocked on my window. I opened the window and one of the policeman asked me what I was doing at the convenience store at that time at night. The other policeman was shining his light at the back seat of my car and they soon realized that my wife and son were sitting in the back seat. Once they saw that I was not alone, their tone became much more polite. They told me that they were surprised to see me because they never see foreigners in that area, especially at that time of night. They then asked to see my driver's license, wrote down information about my license in their notebooks and left.
I was tired after driving 2 and a half hours through a snow storm and just wanted to get to Hachinohe in one piece. When we were actually on the ferry, I started to think about the incident and became very disturbed. If I had an Asian face, there is no way the policemen would have questioned me. So, me being a foreigner made me a suspect. My son has both Asian and caucasian characteristics and is also a Japanese national. Will he also be considered a suspect based on his ethnicity when he stops at a convenience store in the early morning?