People seem to think that living a Jewish life in Japan is impossible… or, at the most, nearly impossible. I don’t know, I grew up Jewish in Japan and obviously, it didn’t seem so improbable or impossible.
Of course, being asked how hard it is is like asking me how hard a language Japanese is. I can describe what difficulties people seem to have learning Japanese, but that is acquired knowledge that I gathered later out of just getting tired of being asked the same question and not knowing the answer to it.
A native speaker does not automatically possess the objective knowledge of a foreign learner of the knowledge. Likewise, the native cultural inheritor does not have the objective knowledge of how hard it might be to live in Japan as a Jew, if that is her life for the first seventeen years of it. What I tell you today is a comparative perspective developed from looking back at it after having lived in big cities in the US for a while. That “big city” qualifier is there because non-big cities in America seem to be just as hard as some places in Japan to live as a Jew—although of course, in what area the “difficulty” lies is different.
