Dearly Beloved

After being rejected from study­ing in Japan…twice, I didn’t give up. In actu­al­ity, it gave me the strength and per­se­ver­ance to prove to myself that I could make this hap­pen. And now, here I am. I was accepted into the year-long study abroad pro­gram at Keio Uni­ver­sity where I have been work­ing on and improv­ing my Japan­ese lan­guage skills along with tak­ing busi­ness and cul­tural classes. But like any long-term relationship,Japan and I have had our ups and downs.

Below the Tokyo Tower

Upon my arrival, I was in a high. I was taken aback and enchanted by all the bright lights and non-stop sen­sory stim­u­la­tion you encounter when walk­ing through the famous Shibuya dis­trict of Tokyo—Go out par­ty­ing one night in Tokyo, and you will see that it is a city that never sleeps, con­stantly alive and invit­ing. I was amazed by the order­li­ness, clean­li­ness and hyper-efficiency of this coun­try that would put any other coun­try to shame. The fact that every Japan­ese I encoun­tered seemed to have a desire to help me (the for­eigner) in any pos­si­ble way no mat­ter how petty, in order to make my adjust­ment a lit­tle less dif­fi­cult. And not to men­tion the food. Lightly bat­tered and deep-fried tem­pura in all sorts of vari­a­tions; panko-breaded crispy pork cut­lets; end­less bowls of my favorite Musashi-ya ramen in a savory and deli­cious pork fat broth; and the fresh­est sushi you’ve ever had that just melts in your mouth, sliced so per­fectly it should very well be pre­sented in an art exhi­bi­tion. Did I men­tion the food? Need­less to say, with a selec­tion of food so great, I gained a few unnec­es­sary pounds.

Tokyo Sky­line

But after every hon­ey­moon the happy bride and groom move in together, and real­ity sinks in. The amaze­ment at every turn wears off, and all you’re left with is the core inte­rior, the bare char­ac­ter­is­tics that in this sit­u­a­tion make up a coun­try. A year is a long time; A long time to spend in a coun­try so dif­fer­ent from your own, and a very long time to be away from home, fam­ily and friends. I am ashamed to say that after about three months of get­ting acquainted with the nuances of Japan­ese— specif­i­cally Tokyo—life, I thought to myself What am I doing here? It’s true that I am half-Japanese, but I am an Amer­i­can before that, and as an Amer­i­can, I was raised in an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic nation. A place where indi­vid­u­al­ity is cher­ished and encour­aged from a young age. I don’t mean to sug­gest that this is the only right way, and its not, but this is what I have grown to know and when com­ing to Japan, this was the bias that I held.

The Japan­ese soci­ety func­tions quite dif­fer­ently. It is deeply rooted in a col­lec­tivist way of think­ing where each indi­vid­ual inter­acts with oth­ers in a way that looks out for the bet­ter whole of the soci­ety rather than indi­vid­ual inter­est. One aspect that we see the col­lec­tivist approach seep­ing out is in Expres­sion. Express­ing one­self is not looked at to be a noble trait. For exam­ple, lets take a rela­tion­ship: com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not seen as key in keep­ing the rela­tion­ship happy. If one part­ner is both­ered by some­thing, it is their job to deal with it on their own so as not to risk hurt­ing the rela­tion­ship by bring­ing it out into the open. I agree that this is one way in deal­ing with a prob­lem, but in my per­spec­tive, being held back from express­ing one’s true feel­ings can fos­ter a lot of isolation.

Another thing I had trou­ble deal­ing with was the amount of peo­ple. Being from the sub­urbs of the U.S. I am accus­tomed to wide-open spaces. If you’ve seen Lost In Trans­la­tion, you’ve seen the insanely crowded streets of the Shibuya cross­ing, and you can pretty much con­clude that Tokyo is a densely pop­u­lated city. Case and point. Every­where I went, I was chal­lenged by a hoard of peo­ple. Trains are so packed dur­ing rush hour that at the sta­tions you will see des­ig­nated “push­ers” that lit­er­ally push the remain­ing strag­glers onto the train like human sar­dines. What I really strug­gled to wrap my head around was that in such a crowded city where I encounter mil­lions of peo­ple a day, I still was unable to reach out to the per­son whose head is jam­ming into my chest and elbow into my side. Although I had made many friends from school and I was lucky to even have some dis­tant rel­a­tives in Tokyo, life in the city that never sleeps, the city that felt so alive upon my arrival, per­sisted in mak­ing me feel more and more iso­lated, and reminded me of the fact that I was oceans away from home.

It was in being con­fronted with sit­u­a­tions like these that really put my patience to the test, and even­tu­ally I snapped. I was frus­trated with my strug­gle to cope in an envi­ron­ment so dif­fer­ent from the one that I was used to, and even more frus­trated with the fact that I could be so frus­trated about some­thing that I prayed and strived so hard for. But what I later came to under­stand was that all of these feel­ings were com­pletely nor­mal. Speak­ing to my fel­low exchange stu­dents, I found out that a lot of them were encoun­ter­ing the same strug­gles and bat­tling with the same ideas. I was able to rec­og­nize that these neg­a­tive feel­ings that I had devel­oped for a coun­try that I loved so much were some­thing that I just had to get through. Another step in the grow­ing process, another bump in the rela­tion­ship. But this is by no means a story on my neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences of my time abroad.

I real­ized that I had to throw away my old biases in order to appre­ci­ate the new. The beauty of trav­el­ling is that you get to expe­ri­ence new ways of life and dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing and my abil­ity to do so was impris­oned by my inabil­ity to let go of my own prej­u­dices and in turn, I was unable to look at Japan for its real beauty and true unique­ness. I had to accept the flaws if I wanted to develop any sort of long-lasting rela­tion­ship with Japan.

Drink­ing green tea at the end of a long day of Kyoto sightseeing

I do not regret the whirl­wind of emo­tions I went through, because through this expe­ri­ence I was able to learn so much about myself. When con­fronted with uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions that are so dif­fer­ent from our “real­ity”, it’s dif­fi­cult to cope and adopt these new meth­ods of behav­ior with­out a risk of los­ing a part of our self. It was so much eas­ier to put up bar­ri­ers in the face of dif­fer­ences and guard myself against any­thing that con­flicted with my own ways of think­ing. But where would that leave us? To become a bet­ter global cit­i­zen, I needed to empathize with my fel­low human beings and adapt to the local cul­ture, rec­og­niz­ing that there is more than one way to oper­ate within soci­ety, which leaves no wrong way. And then, I was able to cre­ate an entirely new way of think­ing. I mean, I am study­ing Inter­na­tional Busi­ness, after all. And after a while, I grew to find the crowds quite com­i­cal. It’s great for peo­ple watch­ing! Some­times I find myself in cafes or while sit­ting on a train, just watch­ing how peo­ple inter­act with oth­ers and even them­selves. It’s a learn­ing expe­ri­ence in and of itself.

In clos­ing, I would like to share a short film with you all. Dur­ing the first few months of my time spent here, a friend and I walked through­out Tokyo while he took shots of the city. This is the end prod­uct, and it does an amaz­ing job con­vey­ing the emo­tion that I feel towards my new, beloved home. Enjoy!

A Night In Tokyo

Much thanks to Jeremy Sudibyo for allow­ing me to put this short film into my blog.

–Aspasea