Aliens

I`ve discovered the secret to instant celebrity. If you aren`t special in your own country, go somewhere where your country makes you special.

A BBC documentary, national broadcast and print, and this is – by a long shot - the most famous I have ever been. All of that time doing interviews and making myself utterly ridiculous, and all I really had to do was be extremely tall, female and white somewhere where absolutely nobody else is extremely tall, female and white. My race, gender and height, apparently, are my trump cards; and there was me, foolishly trying to prove that I had abilities or skills that made me stand out from the crowd. If you want to stand out from the crowd, it`s a lot less hard work if you go somewhere where the crowd is very, very different from you. In fact, it`s no work at all. Blending in is the tricky bit.

(I don`t think I`m the first person to uncover this truth, incidentally. Judging from the quantity of very strange Western men walking around Japan with beautiful Japanese wives and girlfriends, I`m not the only white person to realise that making your race a defining characteristic can be somewhat of an advantage.)

I currently have the kind of fame that Jodie Marsh would rip both of her belts off for. When I go into a supermarket, people stand still with their hands stuck in the chiller section; if I turn around abruptly in the home shop, there are at least two seconds of staring before everybody realises that I can see them and recommence filling their baskets with toilet rolls. Taking a photo of a husband and wife in their wedding outfits on the beach at the weekend – big, frothy green dress and six inch heels on sand – I turned around to discover that the passers-by were ignoring the happy couple and taking photos of the foreigners instead. I feel a bit like Jim Carrey on The Truman Show; when I`m driving my car, other drivers swivel to look at me, and people remain on the pavement when the little green man is walking because they`re so distracted by how strange I am (either that or they assume that I don`t understand the road system and will drive through the red light and kill them). At school, the children follow me around in giggling huddles (sometimes – in the cases of the eight year old boys - hiding behind bushes and bins and stalking me like ninja), asking questions: where am I from? How old am I? Do I have a boyfriend? Where are my shoes from? Why are my eyes green? Why am I so tall? Do I know Angelina Jolie? Can I say hi to her for them? And when I`m done answering (London, 28, no, Topshop, genetics, genetics, yes, of course), they grin at me and drag me into the playground to play soccer, and I spend the rest of the lunch break telling them it`s football.

It`s a very surreal experience; one that I certainly didn`t expect, coming from Tokyo and Yokohama where everybody is so bored of Westerners that you`re usually the first one to get pushed over on the train. I`ve gone from being utterly invisible in every possible way to being incapable of it; I can`t even leave my rubbish out on the wrong day, because everyone will know it was me and it will end up back on my doorstep with a reproachful note and a bad impression of an entire chunk of the world`s population (I don`t represent England; I represent every English speaking country, as well as – apparently – Germany and Russia, according to the guesses of my school children).

Coming from the UK, a cosmopolitan culture, it`s a shock to the system; realising just how – well... Japanese Japan is. If you`re not from Japan you`re foreign (it doesn`t matter where you`re from, incidentally: the rest of the world is classified in one lump as other; my ex once got asked if he could "speak foreign"). I legally have to carry around a Gaijin card to prove that I am allowed to be here, and the word Gaijin literally translates to alien; what I have is, in English, an Alien Registration Card. And – in Nichinan - I really, really am one. I might as well have been beamed in from a shiny spaceship with Will Smith at the helm; it would create the same amount of commotion.

It will wear off soon of course; soon I - “the tall one who doesn`t understand us” - will be just another part of the local surroundings and the community and school children will have adjusted (already nobody is hiding behind bins anymore, and it`s only Tuesday). But it`s been nice, and it`s been educational. Being an alien is an experience that not many people get to have: we get so used to being part of the environment we`re in, that it`s strange to put yourself somewhere shocking and then realise that your environment is shocked straight back.

But – if the warmth and welcome I have received in this part of the country is anything to go by – when the spaceships eventually turn up from outer space (which they will; we all know that) and start beaming tall, funny looking creatures down, I`d advise them to come straight to Japan. In particular, Miyazaki.

Everybody will just assume that they are British.