Originally Posted by AA Gill

"You don’t have to go to Japan to have an inkling that the Japanese are not as the rest of us are. In fact, they’re decidedly weird. If you take the conventional gamut of human possibility as running, say, from Canadians to Brazilians, after ten minutes in the land of the rising sun, you realised they're off the map, out of the game, on another planet. It’s not that they’re aliens, but they are the people that aliens might be if they’d learnt Human by correspondence course and wanted to slip in unnoticed."