I&#x27;ve lived in Japan for 14 years, and I&#x27;m doing a startup here.<p>In my experience, if you stay in Japan for more than a year, you go through several phases.<p>The first phase is confusion. Why am I being treated differently, even though I&#x27;m doing and saying the same things as another Japanese person.<p>The second phase that quickly follows is anger. This is bullshit! I know my accent and pronunciation is correct! Why are they saying they don&#x27;t understand me! WTF!<p>The third is dull acceptance. You&#x27;re not going to change Japan. They&#x27;re not like this because they&#x27;re bad people. They&#x27;re just inexperienced with foreigners and foreign things, and they&#x27;re overcompensating and trying to be nice in the way they think is nice.<p>The final stage is fun. This is the best stage. You understand all the social patterns and why everything is happening, so you just relax and start enjoying it.<p>When you go into a restaurant and order in Japanese and the waiters response is &quot;I can&#x27;t speak English! Sorry!&quot; you respond in Japanese &quot;Oh, I&#x27;m terribly sorry. Is there anyone here who speaks Japanese?&quot;<p>This often (not always) has the interesting effect of changing the &quot;foreigners cannot speak or understand Japanese&quot; mindset, if only for a moment.<p>Sounds like you&#x27;re in between stages two and three. It gets better.<p>To quickly respond to your list:<p>1) It&#x27;s your face. It&#x27;s nothing personal. They&#x27;re just trying to be accommodating.<p>2) My typical response is &quot;I&#x27;ve been using chopsticks since I&#x27;ve been four, since we used to order Chinese takeout. So complimenting me on my chopstick skills feels the same as me complimenting you on your deft fork techniques.&quot; This may result in enlightening your Japanese friends as to why it&#x27;s challenging to be overly grateful for their well-intended compliment.<p>3) Kanji is hard. They&#x27;re just impressed that you can read it, since they spent years as kids studying and repeating kanji over and over again. Having said that, my typical response here is &quot;Actually, I think English is much, much harder than Japanese. Sure Japanese is difficult, but it&#x27;s logical. English is full of exceptions, weird spellings, inconsistent grammar, because it&#x27;s a mix of languages. If I wasn&#x27;t born a native speaker, I can&#x27;t imagine how I&#x27;d learn English from scratch.&quot;<p>4) Yep - you&#x27;re definitely not alone. It can be hard to avoid feeling a bit slighted here. If you haven&#x27;t seen this already: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=oLt5qSm9U80</a> I gently correct people here. &quot;Excuse me - since I&#x27;m ordering, could you please look at me?&quot;<p>By the way, thinking of these things as &quot;micro-aggressions&quot; is a terrible way to think. They&#x27;re not being aggressive. They&#x27;re often just not very familiar with foreign people, and they&#x27;re doing their best to be accommodating. Once you get to stage four, this becomes a lot easier.<p>Good luck, and don&#x27;t forget to swing by the Hacker News Tokyo Meetups if you&#x27;re in Tokyo - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp&#x2F;</a> - we&#x27;re just about to announce another one.