I have a pretty big beer belly. No excuses, just the way it is.
I get the same treatment from kids and, believe it or not, young ladies here in Tokyo. Girls, especially high school to to college age, just can’t seem to walk by me on the train without giving my belly a friendly little pat or poke.
I’ve even had a young lady stop and put her ear on my tummy to “listen to the baby”. I swatted her with my newspaper and her friends giggled themselves to tears.
well, if the girls are pretty....
I do know that Japanese people can be somewhat forward when encountering unusual-looking (to them) people, and Westerners generally - fifteen years ago when I was traveling through Japan with my girlfriend at the time (who had an unusual hair texture and style even by American standards, and who must have appeared like a space alien to many of the people that we encountered, especially in out-of-the-way places such as Kagoshima - one of the maids at the ryokan actually asked me directly if it was OK for her to touch my girlfriend's hair - my GF told me that it was OK and so I gave her the go-ahead)
But I have seen the giggling twenty-something Japanese woman syndrome in the US - a few years back I took a blind date (who was probably 5'2" and 275 lbs. or more) to a Japanese restaurant in NYC (that has lots of Japanese nationals as their clientele). The table next to us had four or five twenty-something women seated, and throughout the meal I could tell (even with my limited Japanese language skills) that they were making fun of her. At the end of the meal as I was getting ready to go, I grabbed my coat off of a nearby hook and accidentally knocked down the coat of one of the next table's "guests", and as she rushed to pick it up I tossed out a "gomen nasai" or a "shitsurei shimasu" in her direction, while she and the rest of her friends suddenly became really quiet as they realized that the dumb gaijin at the next table must have been listening to their cackling all along...