When you first arrive, you’re in Tokyo, you’re with a group of other stunned white people- you don’t really pay attention to the white people around you. They’re there, but at this point they’re not a novelty. If you’re with JET, there’s the three days of intensive sitting around listening to speeches for nine hours a day then heavy drinking late into the night, at which point you wonder where every foreigner you see on the streets of Shinjuku is from, and what prefecture they’re going to (unless they’re still wearing their lanyard) for two weekends the whole of Shinjuku is seemingly taken over by white people. But on the Wednesday morning all the lanyards go in a bucket and each prefectures JET go their separate ways. This was three months ago exactly.
You go through phases. First, every time you see a foreigner you think ‘oh, another white person’ and you smile, wondering if you should say hello. Then you decide against it.
The second phase, you look at other foreigners and you think ‘another foreigner’ and you cringe, because they’re drinking (loudly), speaking English on the train, or even more irritating, sitting outside Starbucks speaking really good Japanese to a Japanese person- a Japanese person who doesn’t dumb down their Japanese by default because they’re speaking to a foreigner (they dumb it down, but somehow they think that means repeating the same thing over and over again will make me understand something I obviously don’t…)
I was at that phase in Fukuoka, a month ago. Now I’m at the point where I look at a foreigner and say ‘hey, it’s a foreigner’ or even worse, ‘a 外人’
I said ｢外人が好きじゃない」 to a Japanese person, meaning I don’t like the whole JET culture of trying to get away from your town to get drunk and sing karaoke with a bunch of foreigners all saying the same things about Japanese schools. She pointed out that, to me, she is a 外人…which is true…sort of.
It’s strange because, with all the warnings about culture shock from Japanese culture, there was little warning us about culture shock from the JET culture, being busy on weekends but having nothing to do on many weekdays, complete lack of discipline in schools meaning occasional fear for my safety (and it is far worse in cities, I hear) and feeling excluded every time I don’t want to get wasted on cheap convenience store liquor and go singing karaoke.
I haven’t rested for many a weekend, with regular ten hour days because of speech contest practice (but it felt good to see the smile on one of my students’ faces when she won, a smile she was still wearing when I saw her and high fived her yesterday) so this weekend I’m sitting at home studying Japanese, going to sleep before ten pm, and probably just watching volleyball on TV ahead of another five busy weekends, right up until the Christmas/New Year’s break.
I realise there will only be a month between when I do my last self-intro and when I start revising it after the New Year’s break. And then a month until I do it for a new bunch of students in April.
It’s getting colder here, and the rain is making the greens change to a darker emerald shade which is fantastic. The reason I don’t get any rest is whenever I’m at home I think I could drive out to the beach for a quick swim, or go for a walk or a bike ride. My cold is really self-inflicted, but I feel like I don’t want to rest- there’s so much I want to experience here, especially if I only have a year to do it.
Peace out.
