Make The World Your Home, But Never Get Comfortable.

“What just happened and how the hell did I get here?” This question plagued my mind as I sat in the staffroom during my first day of work in Japan. Over the past 11 months, I have been in the process of applying to work as an English Assistance Language Teacher and now that I’m here, everything is happening so fast that I haven’t actually registered that I am on the other side of the world, far away from the comforts of what I call home.

I have spent my whole life in familiarity, having never left South African shores for more than 3 weeks before. So if anything, everything up to this point has perhaps just felt like a holiday with a lot of admin. I arrived in Tokyo at the end of July for the JET (Japanese Exchange Teaching) Programme orientation along with 23 other South Africans, and we made our mark despite being outnumbered by the Americans 100/1. In those 3 short days, we became a family and it felt like we’d known each other forever. I sang karaoke for the first time with them, navigated the extremely busy Shinjuku station and train lines with them, and overall, it made me feel like I was right back home. With such a diverse group of races and accents, no one was able to tell where we were from, and that made me realise and appreciate the cultural melting pot that we call South Africa. It wasn’t odd to see us hanging around with people from other nations because you know, we don’t find it weird hanging out with someone that is completely different to us. It was the 2010 World Cup all over again. I felt it, it was there.

That being said, we were then separated after the 3 days in Tokyo and I had that same post-event depression that everyone gets after Oppikoppi. The next I knew, I was sitting alone in my apartment in Takamastu, Kagawa Prefecture, unpacking my life from a 25kg suitcase. The isolating silence that hit me made me feel like Dorothy without her pretty, glittering ruby shoes. However, this was the last bit of the nest that I had to fly from. I started making new friends, some of whom are Japanese and can’t speak English very well, yet we could somehow still hold a conversation and enjoy a meal together. I got on the bullet train and unknowingly landed up at the Pokémon Centre in Osaka. I went to fireworks festivals, saw a Claude Monet exhibition, and even got to see a professional bunraku show. Slowly, as I took more and more steps into the uncharted, I started to understand why James Franco decided to stay in Oz.

This may be disappointing for a few of you reading this, but Japan is nowhere as crazy as everyone thinks it is. Like every other country in the world, it has its cultural differences to South Africa, but that doesn’t mean they’re crazy. No, I haven’t seen dolphin meat on sale, I haven’t been on Ninja Warrior, and no, I haven’t seen any vending machines with used panties on sale. One discussion that stood out for me at one of the pre-departure Q&As back in Pretoria was how we don’t actually experience culture shock here (since we hit a honeymoon phase of awe and wonder), but rather have a reversed effect of it when we return back to South Africa. “No one will care about how Japan was for you, nor will they even understand it” was the general idea behind it which I completely agree with (so if you’ve read this far, I’m seriously flattered).

The language barrier in Japan is obviously something that keeps me on my toes to the point where I spend at least an hour shopping for groceries, attempting to decipher all of the kanji to make sure that I’m buying the right type of laundry detergent. A simple task like that is pretty easy to overlook and go unappreciated back home, and unless you’ve lived in a country where English is not the native language and you’re all alone, you won’t understand how mentally exhausting it can be. As difficult as it may be, the key is not to get frustrated, and to take every opportunity to learn something new, especially if it’s the set of kanji that will lead you back to your apartment.

The world is a fucking big and scary place, but that’s what makes it so damn amazing. Our comfort zones will always exist and it’s always convenient to stay inside of it, regardless of where we are – whether it be the form of sitting behind your laptop for endless hours on the internet or only hanging out with English speakers. We can always hold someone’s hand, but just take the jump and love every step of the journey along the way. Don’t stop learning and appreciate every bit of it, even the bad parts. One of my Japanese students asked me how she can stop herself from being terrified of flying as she’s about to move to another city. After watching a 9/11 documentary, the thought of a loss of control was what frightened her. I told her to just let it be, look out of the window, reflect on how magnificent the world really is, and look forward to exploring the unknown. It didn’t really comfort her (and yes, she did understand what I said), but I’m sure she’ll get it when she’s looking over the island of Hokkaido. When we said goodbye, her parting advice to me was “please don’t die, I’d like to see you again”.

I’m not exactly sure what the point of writing this post was. I think it was maybe a letter I was writing to no one to feel a little grounded, a little closer to home, while making Japan my new one. Time for me to step out of the door and go somewhere that I haven’t been to before.