The First Two Months: A Retrospective

Or, How to Be a Delinquent Blogger

As the pretentious title suggests, I've been in Fukuoka for about two months, and it's not for lack of writing material that I haven't until now started blogging about my experiences—quite the opposite, in fact. After this initial entry, I'm going to have to take some time to recount the best parts of my first weeks here. I don't think it'd be possible to do justice to everything I've done so far in a single post. I mean, how do you describe something like this (seen running continuously in a department store) in one paragraph and the ancient temples of Kyoto (seen in... Kyoto) in the next?

 

Seriously.

Part of the reason this blog is so late in the making is my natural tendency toward procrastination (here my family sighs knowingly), but it owes more to the fact that, in light of the powerful influx of new experiences, it has simply taken me some time to collect my thoughts. I've been out of the U.S. before, but this is my first time away for any extended period. Furthermore, my single experience with dorm life (a monumental failure) has clouded my understanding of college community with memories of melancholy. I've only studied Japanese for one year, so my aptitude is not exactly great. Piling these obstacles one atop the other, it's easy to assume that it might take a while to adjust, but it's all surprisingly less troublesome than you'd think. I don't mean to imply that I am completely comfortable here—not yet—but the challenges of daily life are, well, not so challenging. This is so for a few reasons.

For one, air travel has stripped the distance between this country and my home of its reality. When I arrived, I understood at an intellectual level that I was, in fact, on the other side of the world, but it didn't really feel that way. I boarded what I'd been told was an aircraft, rested my head upon the window, and slept, half-dreaming in the artificial twilight of the cabin. When I was finally fully roused fifteen hours later, I could have been anywhere. Even after leaving the bilingual safety of the airport in Hong Kong, even after riding another plane for several hours more, emerging at last into a city full of signs writ in characters indecipherable and people who speak a language not my own, I didn't feel as if I'd gone very far. The Internet, the ease with which I may communicate with friends and family in the U.S., only further diminishes the effects of travel, and this is compounded still further by my place of residence; living in the International House, among a small horde of English-speaking foreigners, supported by a group of bilingual advisors, it's difficult to feel the full weight of displacement. I wonder how different my experience might've been if I'd been able to take part in a homestay, as I'd originally planned.

Despite all these conveniences (or inconveniences, as these luxuries indubitably impede my comprehension of the Full Exchange Experience), the feeling that I am an outsider is undeniable. A week or two after my arrival, I went walking with one of my new 留学生 (ryuugakusei, "exchange student") friends. We meandered down the main road nearest to the dormitory, intending to explore the environs and maybe investigate a shrine. Our first stop was a place near to the I-House, a building hidden from the road by a stone wall and a large wooden gate: a Buddhist temple, not the most impressive one I've seen since coming here, but nevertheless possessed of a humble beauty. Unsure of ourselves, we passed the threshold, but could press no farther than the secondary gate. The courtyard beyond was of sand and stone, meticulously raked and artfully arranged, and all was serenely quiet. We wanted to see more, but we were hardly certain that we were permitted even as far as we'd gone. So we stood there, peering longingly into the temple beyond.

The temple's inner gate.

The courtyard.

Daunted but not defeated, we resumed our quest. Not too far from campus there stands a 鳥居 (torii), a traditional Shinto gateway. According to a lecture delivered by one of my professors, the structure and its name are among some thought to originate from the ancient belief that birds would alight upon such gates when acting as intermediaries betwixt the heavens and humanity; the word literally approximates something like "bird perch." Beyond the torii, tucked away in the shade between two buildings, there lay a Shinto shrine. Here we thought we might have more luck, but once again we were foiled by our own insecurities: two Japanese men stood chatting at the top of the steps leading through the gate, and though the space was clearly meant for the public, it felt as if there were an invisible wall built between us. Though it is likely that the men hadn't even noticed our presence, had simply stopped there for a rest out of the heat of the day, they seemed to me to be sentinels barring our passage, and we had not the words to request otherwise. Unwittingly denied entrance by these imagined guardians, we wandered away.

It was okay, though. As our diversion led us down the street, we saw this:

Yup.

 

And all was well.

These encounters (yes, even with the gorilla) summarize well my early feelings about being here. The city is strange but not completely foreign, full of small peculiarities which mark it as different from my home. Vending machines are ubiquitous, cartoons are used to illustrate almost everything, bicycles are welcome on the sidewalks, and cars move on the other side of the road. Confusingly, English, adapted (read: transmogrified) for local usage, is everywhere. Really, if the barriers of language and custom did not stand between me and my hosts, it would be easy to forget where I am (and I sometimes do)—but both of these barriers are substantial.

It is a unique frustration, to have so many thoughts to express, so many stories to tell, and to be unable to give them voice. Hitherto, I've only grappled with this problem in language classes at home, which, while enjoyable and informative, do little to prepare students for the experience of immersion in a foreign culture. My social interactions here differ in ways both subtle and overt from those in the U.S. There is, of course, the much-discussed proliferation of bowing and polite exclamations, litanies of apology and thanks, but there is also much more, some of which is wholly resultant of personal idiosyncrasies. For example: I have a tendency to laugh when I enjoy an interaction or otherwise take delight in observing some small behaviors among my interlocutors. This causes enough confusion in the U.S., where I am at least able to explain my sentiments; here, I have more than once had to go to great lengths to reassure my Japanese companions that I was not, in fact, making fun of them (I swear). It is fair to say that my stay here will necessitate a certain amount of introspection.

Symptomatic of that linguistic uncertainty is my locative confundity (which is totally a word). In those first few weeks, I was stuck straddling the border between worlds, neither within nor without. I knew that, in time, my unease would fade—or else be transformed into something greater—but for a while it permeated my every action and experience. This is nothing entirely new, not for me; I am even at the best of times pursued by a dim sense of alienation, a feeling skulking at the periphery of my consciousness, waiting to overwhelm me at any moment. The sentiment lingers; after all, I've not been here very long. I think it would take more time than I have to spend for it to fade, and even then I doubt it ever disappears completely. Why else would longtime expatriates regularly gather in bars, chat in their native tongues, recount stories of homes not quite forgotten?

All of this sounds so very negative (or at least guardedly neutral), but I assure you: I have enjoyed every moment spent here so far. (Well, maybe not every moment: does anyone really like washing dishes?) I don't regret at all my decision to come.

And something interesting happened the other night. Walking back to the dorm after an evening out, my belly full of curry, the midnight streets of this neighborhood dark and comfortably silent, I felt as if the city were showing itself to me for the first time. At that moment, peering briefly into the quiet heart of this place, I felt a twinge of something familiar, and I thought that, maybe, I could come to belong here—at least for a little while.

Already looking like a native. On LSD.