Message and Mail Exchanges

yo,

what's up with japanese folks never answering back after the initial 1-2 message or mail exchanges without saying a word? Anyone else experiencing this?I mean, they drop me a line after reading my add,saying they would be really interested in becoming friends, I answer them back and after that it's dead.

I don't think it's because not proper understanding the mails because I write all my messages and mails in english and japanese.My japanese is really good and I always make sure to keep my messages as polite and indirect as possible.

I'm aware of the fact that younger japanese have a tendency to just kill relationships without saying anything, but I'm in my mid-twenties and the people with whom I exchange are also in their mid-twenties to early thirties.

Is this considered normal by them? I will be
moving to japan later this year and I really don't hope they are like that in 'real life'
too..

I find it easier for me if a person never writes back rather than to say to me, "I've decided not to write back to you any more." And sometimes the person writes back after many years.

By the way, I'm Japanese and there are several non-Japanese people living abroad who haven't written to me for a much longer time than expected.

Dear edo332,
you are not alone who faced this... Me and many other people on this site complained about the same issue, just look through the older posts.

At least the more similar posts i read the more i get assured.

Take it easy, try and you will succeed. There are also people on this site who became long-term relationship penpals, so there are positive outcomes as well.

Good luck!

It's not necessarily that you're doing anything wrong, but this seems to happen to a lot of people on a regular basis.

For various possible reasons someone who tells you that they want to remain friends for years ends up exchanging a couple of emails and then you never hear from them again.

It's just the nature of how online penpals work I suppose, but it's not really anyone's fault per se.

Yeah I don't think this is anything to do with being Japanese. It's just that people get excited about the idea of having international pen-pals, and then the novelty wears off and they just stop. Unfortunately the very thing that makes email communication so useful also makes it very easy for someone to just 'disappear', which is pretty harsh on the other person.
Just to offer some support, I contacted two people in Japan using this site, one sort of vanished into Facebook land and doesn't write anymore, but I've been regularly emailing the other for several months now and it's been good fun :-)

Yeah, it's not just a japanese thing. I've had plenty of americans (I'm american) do this to me.

And it isn't everybody. I've been penpals with one japanese woman for 7-8 months now, although we only email each other sporadically. I've been in regular contact with another japanese woman (whom I met while I was in japan) for the past 6 months. And I started chatting with another about a month ago. But there are others with whom I've only exchanged one or two messages, and that was all.

I agree with GMatt, there is nothing wrong with you or your messages. The novelty simply wears off and people move on.

I encountered it quite often too and have grown used to Hi, bye disappearing acts.

yeah, and dumped again by someone after 1 mail,
i guess it's impossible to make japanese friends till you're actually there in person..

I start to think that the majority of japanese people here only want to exchange a few mail in broken english for some laughs but when they realize you can actually talk about stuff with them in JAPANESE they get nervous..

Many Japanese people doubtlessly participate in order to communicate in English and not in Japanese. A non-Japanese person whose primary purpose is to practice his broken Japanese will just as likely terminate a conversation that does not move into the expected direction.

Another possible reason is that they received too many messages from other people, and can only handle to upkeep a few of the most promising conversations.

Online relations are like throw-away relations. They are much easier to make than real-life relations. And they are more prone to result in mismatches because you can't observe and hear your conversation partner. Everything is just based on some superficial words on a computer screen that could come from anybody. As a result, the failure rate is much much higher than in real-life, and it requires patience to find a good match.