a ginger story i was told

During my time in Japan I lived in a city of 4 million people called Nagoya, which is the industrial heartland of Japan but, in the late 1980s when I was there, had a very small expatriate population. Consequently the locals had rarely encountered foreigners, especially those with bright red hair and thick, bushy red beards. The first new Japanese word I learnt was 'Gaijin' - the Japanese word for foreigner, which translates literally as 'outside person'. It was a word I heard every single day I was there, usually said with a little gasp of horror, shock or surprise. I found my physical appearance caused all sorts of reactions, from people crossing the street to avoid walking near me, to taxis slowing down then speeding off when they saw I was foreign to bus loads of school children pointing and shrieking and laughing as they drove past me. The most extreme reaction came once in a fast food restaurant. I had gone up to the counter and the girl there had her head down and was checking her till. She then looked up, saw me in all my gingery hairiness and had a hysterical fit. She started laughing maniacally, but this was a frightened, embarassed laugh, not a happy one, and the longer I stood there the worse it got. She seemed frozen to the spot yet unable to stop laughing at the sight stood in front of her until eventually her manager spotted what was happening and took her off into the back to calm down. That experience, and others like it during my time in Japan, gave me a new insight into the whole subject of racism. White Anglo-Saxon types are usually portrayed as the world's only racists and yet being the victim of racism in Japan opened my eyes to the fact that racism seems to be a universal attribute rather than one reserved for whites. And I suppose that begs the question: is it 'racist' to make fun of gingers? In America a common metaphor for something deeply unliked is that it is 'as popular as a red-headed stepchild' and have you noticed how in American film and TV the school bully is almost invariably a redhead?