The Lady and the Monk

There needs to be a term for people who once lived in Japan and don't anymore. Ex-expatriates? But in my day 'expat' had a very precise meaning: it was a foreigner working for a large multinational, living in one of the hideously expensive gaijin districts, in a palatial apartment that his (usually) company paid for, associating with other expatriates, probably not speaking much Japanese and certainly not reading any: a psychic holdover from the Occupation, whatever its real age; and despised by the rest of us who taught English and studied Japanese and lived in mokuzou haitsu (two storey wooden buildings with maybe a two-room apartment on each floor) or the more modern one-room/ galley-kitchen/ unit bath apaatos, or even an over-priced gaijin house with cockroaches and shared bath and toilet.

So ex-expat won't do. Maybe FJR: 'formerly Japan resident.' In any case, FJRs will always read books on Japan with a different slant from anyone else. I'm not sure what Pico Iyer is actually doing in The Lady and the Monk-- sober memoir? fictionalization? populated travelogue?-- and only mildly interested in how he does it. (Even if the events are factual the structure is artistic, so that it's all lovely sensuous mysterious Kyoto for many chapters and only near the end is there a paragraph about the noise in the guest-house Iyer lives in, that would have made *me* leave in a day.) With the single-mindedness of the FJR I'm only interested in how his Japan looks compared to mine.
( By me, he does a better job than most )