“My ethnicity makes up 0.05% of the population of where I live in Japan, I know what it is like when nothing is designed for you…”  

 I am a bit of an oddity.  While I was born and raised in the suburbs of Boston in a very un-diverse little town, after college I moved to Japan for what was to be a 2 year stint as a research scientist…I have lived here for more than 25 years now after falling in love with the country and my now wife.  I live in the backwoods of Japan, the countryside.  In the prefecture I live in, my ethnicity is about 0.05% of the population, in my everyday life I can go literally months without seeing a non-Japanese person.  So I understand what it is like when things are not designed for you, clothing proportions are all wrong, shoes don’t fit properly, furniture is not the right size, I hit my head on door jambs in old houses.   I don’t expect to have things made for me here when I make up such a small part of the population.  But why is it that in the United States or Europe where ethnicities are much more diverse, that design is so uniformly the same?