I am the 1%

Actually I am the less than one percent.

That is how many of us white kids are in Japan. The total foreigner tally of Japan marks up to a good 2.5 billion but then you have to subtract all the Korean Pachinko owners and their families and also the Chinese businessmen stealing Japanese tech and retired manpower. Also the Brazilians who for some weird reason took Japan by storm a few years back and have been good friends ever since. And there you have the rest of us; the Indians and their restaurants, the Filipinos and their Japanese obsessions, and the White people and their English. Turns out that 100,000 for all of these nationalities and almost any other, is a pretty charitable number.
Japan's population is a whopping 127.5 million people, that is ever decreasing as their birthrate is in decline. Japan is a wonderful place for tourism, but it turns out that it might just not be the place for foreigners to settle down and spend a few years for life. Well it is for the English teachers, but for many other professions, it just might not be the place.
Living here I have on ever met one other employed foreigner who did not work for anything other than the English language. He was from France, Lyon, and worked at Uniqlo and was the better part of trilingual. He was studying at a university in Kyoto and had a part time job to help him get by. There are actually plenty of foreigners who actually go to school here. I love right next to a university that has perhaps 50 foreigners going there. And if you have read anything else I have written, you would know that I live in a really small city that has not that much to offer (and thus the students don't actually live here, they live in more lively areas and just come to school here everyday). But I consider myself very lucky for this passing foreigner recognition. There are many out in the inaka that don't have these opportunities and are faced with much fewer encounters to even utilize their English in a natural conversation. At least I have the opportunity.
The few foreigners that I know of who have jobs other than English-related careers are people I have never really met. They are or were the CEO's of large company's, or a supposed statistic of businessmen who have been position here on a contract for a few years, located in large places like Tokyo. The CEO's of which I speak are actually no longer. It turns out it is very difficult to change the way Japanese people might think leading to some having to step down from the positions. The only one I know in a current position of major recognition, is the CEO of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn.
The major reason for the minority of foreigners in Japan is probably due to the high cost of living here and the inability to purchase the comforts of home. For example, or for redundancy since I know that everyone who has ever been to Japan has mentioned this, fruits are an extreme sore point as the prices in Japan are skyrocketed 500yen (perhaps 6 USD) for strawberries. Year round. I mean unless they are damaged. Actually during Christmas, strawberries prices are inflated to 900yen due to the Christmas cakes and everybody needing to make one. Another super good example. For anyone who knows the game Skyrim, the price of the game here in Japan is 7180yen, the price back home is 49.99USD - or less depending on where you buy it! Another ridiculous example. Fans. The normal electric kind you plug in and enjoy in the summer heat. I was walking around a department store and saw a perhaps meter and a half tall with 40cm rotating blade or so and it looked very normal. It was also 12,000yen. Over a hundred dollars. Ovens here are not sold for less than 10000 yen (cheap is about 30000yen and they go over 100000yen) and are about the size of a normal kitchen microwave. Actually I mistook them microwaves at first. As they are electric and not gas (or at least not that I have seen yet).
So there is definitely a huge tourism draw to the country with their ancient shrines and temples and numerous historic sites, but the limited job market and the ridiculous cost of living make it a fairly uninhabitable environment for most foreigners to stay too long. Thus making me a very small percent indeed.
And a side note, imagine the percentage of and African or African-American people here trying to make a living. We consider them a minority in America, but it seems to me that we, Americans as a population, have no idea what minority means until we live in an environment where we are such a small percent that there can be a day or even a week that goes by where we do not see anyone who we can have a chat with (in our natural tongue of course). Though that of course depends on where you live and how out going you are.