Being a foreign female in Japan can be quite an embittering experience, especially if said foreign female is at all looking for romantic companionship with the opposite sex. This bitterness eventually traces back to two inalienable facts:
Japanese men are
total assholes, and
Japanese women are easy. These assertions may sound like sweeping generalizations, but for all practical purposes they are essentially true.
I should dispense with two disclaimers before go any further. First, I am not female. I have, however, lived in Japan for going on a year now, and I have more than enough female friends to feel confident that I can reasonably represent their views. Second, I am going to make several more generalizations. Obvously, there are exceptions to every rule, and some foreign women find happy, stable relationships in Japan (your mileage may vary, blah, blah, blah). Most, however, have to wait until they return home.
Japanese Men Are Assholes
Despite increasing societal changes in recent years, Japan still remains a largely pre-feminist society. Boys are treated like kings from infancy, spared from all household chores, feted and served by their mothers, aunts, and even their older sisters. The majority of Japanese men will never cook a meal in their life, and even simple tasks such as making tea may be beyond their experience. Japanese men who are single basically eat out for every meal, taking advantage of Japan's vast array of ridiculously cheap restaurants. As a man, I frequently encounter amazement on the part of Japanese when they learn that I cook my own meals, and on at least one occasion, a woman was shocked to learn that I actually take out my own trash (I'm not sure whom she imagined would take it out for me, as I lived alone at the time).
Japanese women, meanwhile, can seem almost eager to cook and clean. If a man even hints that he is hungry or thirsty or needs a new set of chopsticks or something, whatever Japanese woman happens to be in the room will tend to automatically assume the statement was a request directed at her and will dutifully retrieve the desired item. When Japanese women find themselves alone or with nothing to do, they have an overwhelming urge to tidy up or wash dishes or otherwise make themselves useful. I have repeatedly found my dishes washed or my room vacuumed while I was out by one of my roommates' girlfriends. Ridiculous.
It is not surprising that Japanese men, having grown up in such an environment, have a series of cultural expectations that make them seem like total assholes whenever Western women encounter them for a reasonable length of time. Even the nicest of Japanese men, who takes the greatest efforts to be kind and solicitous toward Western women, will have unconscious expectations that can make him appear to be a complete jerk. And to add insult to injury, Japanese men (who fetishize foreign women as much as any other men in the world), upon finding Western women unamenable to their nonexistant charms, seem to have few qualms about leering at, groping, and otherwise harrassing Western women whenever they can do so relatively anonymously or when they get drunk enough. Ugh.
Japanese Women Are Easy
Western men tend to find Japanese women highly attractive. As I mentioned, Japan is still largely a pre-feminist society, and thus most Japanese women wear short skirts and high heels on an everyday basis as a matter of course. Japanese women will spend an hour putting on makeup to go shopping at the local mall. The sad fact is that in Japanese society women still tend to be heavily judged by their looks rather than their brains or talent, and even if they have brains and talent, aren't allowed very many opportunities to display them. Moreover, as things proceed, many Western men have a chance to find out that Japanese women are eager to please in the sack and are "adventurous" or have "no out of bounds" by Western standards, largely due to a lack of Judeo-Christian traditions of female prudery. Thus many Western men who have been in relationships with Japanese women start to view Western women as "stuck-up," "arrogant," "impossible to please," or just plain "bitches," as opposed to comparatively subservient, uncomplaining, mild-mannered, great-in-the-sack, and not to mention gorgeous Japanese women.
Japanese women, for their part, find relationships with Western men very fulfilling. Even men who by any Western standards would be considered complete bastards can seem like gentlemen when compared to past Japanese boyfriends. Japanese women are delighted and suprised by simple things like the fact that Western men actually want to talk to them, and actually hold them after sex. Japanese women are also much more suceptible to little gestures such as opening doors for them (usually, they have to let men go first), or bringing them tea (a man bringing tea? unheard of!) - gestures Western women are more likely to dismiss as superficial or even insincere attempts to get into their pants (hmm... maybe they are on to something).
If you spend even a few weeks in Japan, you are sure to see average, older, or otherwise ordinary-to-ugly looking Western men on the arms of comparatively beautiful Japanese women, who you would normally assume were out of their league. In Japan, the usual Western calculus in which the man has to woo and win the woman is virtually reversed at times. The result is a remarkably high percentage of Western men ending up with Japanese girlfriends within very short periods of time after arriving in Japan.
A Bitter Pill
The losers in this cultural interchange are the Western women (and perhaps to a lesser extent, Japanese men), who more often than not find themselves lonely and boyfriendless for the duration of their stay in Japan. Any attempt they make to date Japanese men inevitably ends in disaster. I have been in Japan for a year now and have yet to meet a single Western woman who has been in a relationship with a Japanese man for longer than a month (although I've heard a few friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend tales). Western men, meanwhile, repeatedly dump, spurn, or ignore them for the first half-witted pair of Japanese T&A that (often literally) lands in their lap. This process can only repeat itself a limited number of times before said Western woman begins to feel that she is completely surrounded by assholes (Japanese men), dick-for-brains bastards (Western men), and brainless sluts (Japanese women). Her only true friends are the other Western women who share her plight, and in some of the worse cases, she ends up settling for a string of unsatisfying desperation one-night stands with Western men who she wouldn't even have noticed back home. The resultant histrionics can make the Western woman seem even more like a bitch in comparison to Japanese women.
The sad part about all this is its really nobody's fault. Japanese men can't really help they way they were raised, nor can Japanese women. Some Western men really are total bastards, and use the Japanese women as little more than sex toys, but many are decent guys who simply find their lives easier and happier with a Japanese girlfriend. And of course, you definitely can't blame those Western women who are turned into bitches by Japan, after some of the shit they have gone through for the simple crime of daring to want some lovin'.