Japanese teacher to me today at lunch: Your food bowl so big, a goldfish could swim in it.

Tonight I celebrate my one month anniversary in Japan. Things are just starting to get settled and started and I feel that it is as good a time as any to reflect. I live in Kunugiyama which is located about as close to Tokyo as you can get while technically not residing in Tokyo. It is an interesting place and really unlike anyplace I have ever lived before. To me it looks like a bunch of random city elements tossed together haphazardly and then packed full of people. It has some factories, some company headquarters, some pear orchards, some restaurants and bars, a few train stations and for the moment lots of fields of onions. It’s not a grid, it doesn’t have a main street, is not a suburb and it is definitely isn’t rural. It is its own Japanese model and it is exciting to explore and try to grasp.

I literally took my very first look at Japanese in the airplane coming here so while I had little demanded of me my first three weeks here at work, I was not sitting idly. Japanese is quite the difficult language to begin learning because it consists of three separate scripts, none of which use the Latin based characters of any of the romance languages I’ve studied in the past. At first it really does look like a bunch of arbitrary squiggles, but after a bit, your mind gets used to them. Two systems are complicated but learnable while the third, kanji, will require some time. Kanji is what makes learning Japanese much more complicated than say Spanish. With Spanish any word that I would see on any sign I could look up in a dictionary and teach myself quite a bit just by walking down the street with a dictionary. When things are written in Kanji, the more complicated looking originally Chinese symbols; it is very difficult, if not impossible for a beginner of Japanese, to look them up in a dictionary. Therefore I think that being able to have a decent conversation after the one to two years I hope to spend here seems to be a reasonable goal, while writing with any proficiency would be getting a bit ahead of myself. Therefore, I spent my first three weeks studying most every waking moment and pushing my brain to overdrive trying to learn the basics as quickly as possible. Since school has begun I have much less time to study, but on the other hand, many more Japanese teachers whose brains I can pick. One month later I can say some animals, a bunch of objects and loads of un-conjugated verbs. It makes conversations fun and exciting when they do happen, which is not common. I am expected to speak only English at Living Room Floor Plan (39m2) Bedroom Kitchen school and Japanese people, from what I have witnessed so far, are not as excited to come up and talk with foreigners as in other countries I have visited. In fact, nobody even looks at me, which is bizarre considering I have blazing copper hair and normally reek of patchouli.

My very first day basically moved me into my new life here. I filled out the majority of the paperwork I needed to, I purchased a bike, we went to the bank to set up an account, lights, a bed (aka a thin mat they call a futon), toilet paper were purchased, and I was registered as a foreign resident at city hall. Not bad for 9 hours of running around frantically with my new Japanese co-workers. People here can be very patient and not show stress or fatigue. The rest of the time before school started was spent getting other odds and ends that every day I would realize I didn’t have, like dish soap and salt. I would go to school, which is a ten minute bike ride away, half days because no students and almost none of the teachers were there. I slowly got more comfortable with the neighborhood and can now find my way around fairly well. I have a very nice bakery, large grocery store, small vegetable market, convenience stores and loads of restaurants all within a five minute bike ride from my home.

I work at two schools to be more precise. School one, named Matsudo Kokuksai, I go to Monday, Wednesday and Friday and school two, Yakuendai, on Tuesday and Thursday. The later is actually an agricultural school surrounded by a beautiful small scale farm which half the student population works at the second half of the day. I have only been going there for one week now, but am very excited to explore that program more. I have been invited to grow peanuts with one of the teachers. The first school is an “international” school, which in Japan means that there is more of a focus placed on English. Having attending classes at both schools now, I can say that the students at Matsudo really do have a high level of English and I am able to have a decent conversation in with many of the students. Some come up to me after class and go nuts when I say “goat” in Japanese, Yagi for you curious learners, or when I remember their names. I am always resorting back to Spanish to remember Japanese and it is fairly helpful. There are many girls named Yuka, which spelled a bit differently is a pretty common Latin American vegetable. Azuka, another girl names, sounds similar to sugar in Spanish. And I even met a Reina the other day, queen.

School goes from 8:30 in the morning until around three or four depending on the day. Classes are 50 minutes long and I teach between three and five periods, out of seven, per day. So far, in all of our classes I have just been presenting myself so I am excited to stop talking about myself and talk about anything else. With all of the English teachers at both schools I can hold a conversation in English which makes my communication not so difficult. If anything communication comes from a specific Japanese way of speech and expressing ideas. I will talk about this in upcoming writings because I am still trying to decode it all. Regardless, at Matsudo I also have a woman from France, a Wisconsinite and an Australian who have been teaching for some time now so I am not lacking in conversation partners or mentors at my school.

Other odds and ends I should mention before closing up this reflection. Japan is SOOOOO hot, or rather SOOOOOOO humid. I legitimately think I have never been so hot in all of my life. It is common practice here to carry around sweat towels, men and women, because otherwise everyone would be dripping all of the time. 7elevens are everyone here and you can even pay your bills at them, and it is illegal to ride your bike with an umbrella. Also, despite what any anime says, I have not yet seen a robot, or they are so well designed they look just like humans. Also there are loads of cicadas and the noise they make here is impressive.

Looking to the month ahead I am in high spirits. I am going to try to go to a rock climbing gym and maybe make some friends. I just began attending Japanese lessons where an elderly Japanese woman points to words and I read them like a four year old with a speech impediment, but slowly I hope to improve my Japanese by attending. I also have faith that it will cool down a bit, making it more livable here. In the meantime, on I go. Thank you for your support everyone.

James