What Bob Should Know

Aug 08, 12 What Bob Should Know

"I am freakin' out. It is one week before departure. Quick! Write more articles so I can feel ready" That was the Facebook message I got from Bob, a friend and former student who is moving to Japan this week to start a teaching job. Bob knows some things about Japan in an academic way. He studied the language for a few years and took a culture class. He plays lots of video games. He has enough familiarity with Japan to know that he is getting himself into something vastly different from the life he currently knows. And now, with one week until take off, he is feeling a little anxious. So Bob, this one's for you.

On Embracing Another

Jul 21, 12 On Embracing Another

Even if you grew up in an expressive environment, if you have spent a lot of time in Japan and worked to acclimate yourself to the culture, your greeting instincts become scrambled and reset. You learn that hugging Japanese friends and family makes them uncomfortable and then you become unsure of what to do when you see your foreign friends who also live there. Do you hug only if you haven’t seen them in a long time? You forget if you hug friends every time you see them or if there is some other algorithm involved. It starts to strike you as odd when you are home and you hear your friends and family ending every phone call with “Love you!”

Bathing with Strangers

Jul 06, 12 Bathing with Strangers

“Shall I scrub your back?” offered the elderly woman sitting at the neighboring stool. “Yes, Thank you,” I replied as I nodded my head in a bow and then angled myself so this lady, whose name I never did learn, could soap and scrub my back with a wash cloth. This wasn’t at a spa where I was paying for a body scrub, it was the neighborhood hot spring I had been frequenting for a couple of years. This simple gesture by one of the regulars let me know I was now considered one of them.

From the Foreign to the Familiar

Jun 24, 12 From the Foreign to the Familiar

Names are important. In the very first poem of the Man-yôshû, Japan’s first poetry anthology dating from the late 8th century, the emperor-poet Yûryaku implores a young woman picking herbs on a hillside “Tell me your name!” Whether it’s an ancient emperor, The Zombies, Lynyrd Skynrd or Jesse McCartney, getting someone’s name is the way you start to make a connection. One of the first sentences you’re likely to hear in Japanese is “Onamae wa?, meaning “Your name is...?” It seems like the answer would be simple enough, right?