It's not that she's American, specifically. It's that she's not Japanese. Apparently people don't trust foreigners? I don't know if you read Bee's trip report when she went to Japan (I can't remember her actual username, just that it involves bees.) but she mentioned how the Japanese are really invested in keeping their country clean and polite, etc. Like, when you go to the train station, people stand in lines rather than just picking a random spot on the platform. There's like an unwritten code that everyone follows. So anyone who isn't Japanese isn't raised doing things in that way, and they can't be sure that person will follow that code. So they will trust a Japanese person over a foreign person most of the time. So if they have multiple applicants to adopt a cat, they are probably going to favor a couple where both people are Japanese over one where one is a foreigner.
Yeah, I get that....and with your son in college, there are also times he wouldn't be available and the dog would still need to be taken care of, so then it falls to you. As much as I love dogs, I just don't think we have room for one here. Our house is small, and while small dogs don't take up much space, it IS a huge commitment. And I like to be able to go places, which you have to make arrangements for the dog when you go anywhere, even for a day. We used to try to take our dog on vacation with us, but it was hard. Not every place allows pets, you can't take them into restaurants or site seeing, so you either have to leave them in the car, which is dangerous, or we used to chain ours up to the tire with a food and water dish right there, but that's also not ideal. He could have gotten hit by another car pulling in or out, someone could have just detached his chain and stolen him, people might have baited him until he got aggressive. We started leaving him with a friend, but we had to make sure they would be available when we wanted to take our vacation, and it was just really hard. And I had the same thing you did when we had to put him down. I was devasted. My mom had him put town without telling me she was going to, so I never got to say goodbye, and it was 2 weeks before she died, so I was grieving the loss of both. And my mom called me at my friend's wedding where I was a bridesmaid to tell me that she had had him put down.....it was incredibly bad timing, and just all around awful. I don't want to go through that again.