The curse of dating in Japan

I’m ending my first year living in Japan having experienced a full range of new rules around gender and sexuality, good and bad. GOOD: wait there must surely be some good? My friends often tell me that when I talk about Japan, I hardly have anything good to say about it. It’s good to be tested and it’s good to be out of one’s comfort zone. I think that those are good things. I had gotten to used to way things were in North America. I was a flower and boys were like birds and bees. It seemed like the law of nature that would remain unchangeable, WAKE UP CALL: it had changed when I moved countries. Even the non Japanese men were not naturally attracted to me. I was suddenly whisked back to the days of being a sexy high school teenager that had very few friends and was not in the popular crowd. The popular guys would at least be attracted to me sexually and use me for sex or making out, which to a 15 or 16 year old girl looking to get experiences seemed empowering. Since I am long past high school, when the boys who do approach me come up to me as an adult in Tokyo, they are drunk and far too forward or they are online and far too forward and they have no sense of how to flirt or actually connect with me. Or they just use me as a practice ground for conversations of interest when their reality has no space for the reality of us (they are married or something else). They aren’t willing to take me out on a date or have a get to know me conversation, they ask immediately for a kiss or sex. I can assess if a man is actually feel me from a soul level or just horny. Being a flesh container for horniness is no longer empowering, even if I get paid for it. For many many years, about fifteen or so I would be that container and make a good living from it and it felt empowering until it didn’t. When I was in high school I was collecting experiences of youth and it was exciting even when I knew that the boys who were with me weren’t really seeing me in the way that I longed to be seen. When I was a sex worker I lived my life in a way that told me and the boys in the bodies of men that I did not care. I got my power from making money off of the physical desires of men. When you notice a pattern, it is said that three times it happens in a row then the pattern is not usually them, but it is you. I am currently looking at this and restructuring how I approach the dating world of Japan. I have had issues meeting people where they are at, even if we are all in Japan. The non Japanese men that I meet seem to want something that is not in me, or perhaps they are like me and wanting to run away from the similarities in their home countries that I reflect. I prefer to date someone that speaks Japanese. I don’t want to date someone who speaks English only because I know that a good relationship involves spending lots of quality time together and I can’t sacrifice that time in my journey of becoming fluent in Japanese to be speaking English only. This could be limiting my choices. I don’t think so. I have opened myself up to meeting with people who speak English but they still don’t call me. Maybe I'm stubborn on my standards. I believe he or she is out there.