That's just too cool. I've never had the guts to go out in public in Japanese dress (except when my home-stay family dressed me in kimono for New Years). But at Pennsic one year, a Japanese visitor stopped me and asked to take a picture of me. Funny how things that don't embarass me in real life embarass me when dressed Japanese.

Oh, and I don't know if you know this (so please forgive me if this is pedantic), but you might lose the "red dye" associations if you knew it's three words: hen na gaijin. "Hen" is the adjective, but it's a special kind that needs a linking word to add it to a noun. That's the "na". "Na" in and of itself doesn't mean anything. (It's kind of like the "no" in Fujiwara no Aoi.)