About ten Japanese tourists each year require urgent psychiatric care after visiting Paris. And all because of the unfriendly attitude of the local population. According to Reuters, in 2006 the Japanese Embassy in Paris was forced to repatriate at least four tourists from France. Among those forcibly returned were, in particular, two women who began suffering from persecution mania. The poor Japanese women thought their room was bugged and that they were being followed on the street. As reported by press attaché of the Japanese embassy, Yoshikatsu Aoyagi, they also had a man who imagined himself to be the 'Sun King' Louis XIV, and a woman who believed she had been attacked by a microwave oven.
According to a psychologist at the hospital of the Hotel-Dieu, located next to Notre-Dame Cathedral, about a third of such patients recover quickly, another third experience remission, while the rest suffer from various types of psychosis for a long time. 'When you arrive in a country expecting to see one thing, and reality turns out to be completely different, you experience psychological stress. Probably, the fragile psyche of the Japanese cannot withstand such a shock,' noted psychologist Herve Benhamou in an interview with the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
Bernard Delage from the association 'Young Japan', which deals with the emigration of Japanese families to France, states: 'In Japanese stores, the customer receives maximum attention; here, sellers will not even look at you until you approach the cash register. On public transport, you will be pushed, and then on the street you will be robbed. All this greatly affects the psyche of the Japanese.'
According to the Japanese themselves, the most painful thing for them is that France does not meet their expectations. 'We come here full of delight. We expect to see elegant, refined, and intelligent Parisians. When we discover that you are the complete opposite of our ideas about you, it becomes sad,' one Japanese emigrant told Journal du Dimanche.
However, psychologists have been aware of the phenomenon now observed among Japanese tourists for quite some time. Honorary member of the Russia-Japan Committee of the 21st century and author of many monographs on the mentality of representatives of various nationalities, Vsevolod Ovchinnikov, once noted that unfamiliar surroundings provoke people into not always adequate reactions. 'An Englishman, for example, when finding himself in an unfamiliar environment, among unknown and unpredictable foreigners, as it were, deploys into battle formation, reacting harshly to everything unusual,' he writes in his book 'Roots of the Oak.' Therefore, the reaction of the Japanese, according to psychologists, is largely determined by their national mental type.
Two years ago, the psychiatric community already addressed the problem of inadequate reactions of Japanese to unfamiliar surroundings. At that time, the issue of psychological stability of representatives of the Land of the Rising Sun was discussed on the pages of the psychiatric journal Nervure. Apparently, now after the statement of the Japanese diplomatic mission in France, scientists will have to tackle this problem more seriously.