Caucasian people stand of the crowd in Japan. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. My wife and I have many interesting interactions with Japanese people, while we were in our tourist mode in Kyoto during my sabbatical five years ago.
Kyoto has many famous tourist attractions, and local schoolchildren, knowing that they can count on meeting foreigners there, often approached us with their their school assignments to interview foreign tourists in English. This happened to us so consistently that it quickly became a sort of entertainment. More often than not, the children did not really care about what we answered to their questions, which some of them obviously memorized phonetically, and just recited on cue. Sometimes, they would not wait for the previous question to be finished before reading their own. Still, they seemed genuinely happy and full of the sense of accomplishment by having completed their part of the “interview a foreigner” script.
Often, the children would also ask us to take a picture of them with the famous landmark in the background (and sometimes, posing together with one of us). Far from being a nuisance, these regular encounters with kids, with all their initial awkwardness, pride of having pushed the social barrier (taking to a gaijin) and delight at being understood, became a highlight of our trip to Kyoto.
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