Japan Series (Part 1): Stranger

This is a three-part series about my year as an exchange student in Sapporo, Japan.

Japan greets me with kind, alien arms. Tokyo is eerily silent, then overwhelmingly full of buzzing sounds. Each street vacillates between the deafness of being plunged underwater, then breaking the surface to a crash of blinding lights. I only pass through, intrigued and intimidated by this new world.

When I confess to restaurant owners that I’ll be studying in Hokkaido, they all gush in awe, saying how the northern food is the best in the country. I fly north with a newfound curiosity to test local rumors.

Sapporo is smaller, colder, and a city which soon becomes home. The local pride of Hokkaido’s elusiveness, freshness and kindness quickly grows on me. This discovery was shared along with twenty other foreign exchange students, a group that quickly became family as we huddled to cook in the campus dorm, evading curfew and non-drinking rules. Among Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese, Americans and Indonesians, we were all a happy bunch.

Being the only European was an unsettling feeling at first, but I learned to bear its responsibility with enough grace, I am told, as I was the only one who could converse in both English and Japanese decently enough to be understood by both groups. When I found my schedule was not shared with the others, the only thing that gave me courage to get through class was that sliver of confidence that I could converse a bit with Japanese students.

I would continually push myself to be with people, to show up and show effort in exposing myself to this foreign culture as a docile apprentice. I’d have to mute my sometimes obnoxious American ego, but also display certain performances of said “western style” to please their curious inquiries, like a magician revealing the secret card to a happy child. My three nationalities became a source of intrigue with which I could play despite being a plain old white girl, but no matter who I played, I had to accept my white skin with my desire to bond with the locals.

I practised an attitude of deep respect, thinking I was imitating a Japanese’s natural, perfect politeness - refusing a gift three times before accepting, always using honorifics, always bowing, always offering first before taking. But as I spent more time in Japanese circles, I came to the dumbfounding conclusion that they were just regular people.

With their deep social codes, hidden messages, complex subtext, everybody had idealised the Japanese to be beings of elite, effortless respect and wordless understanding. Seeing my friends and teachers bashfully wave off “proper etiquette” and complain about misunderstandings was deeply reassuring, and it let me laugh it off with them. It brought us closer in a way that no idealisation could ever have.

I hold a particular fondness for that first semester in Japan. I confronted there for the first time deep feelings of strangeness and foreignness, but the warmth with which I was taken in by friends soothed that ache. As snow started to pile on the streets, I felt myself sinking into the comfort of a new routine, a new city and new friends.