I had to go to the Iwate Agricultural Junior College yesterday to teach some English and make a presentation about American customs. These are kids right out of high school, who are learning how to work the fields and grow vegetables - learning English is not number one on their priority list. The Japanese teacher told me to “have a conversation with them, real casual” and I had trouble getting more than a “Hi, my name is ~” out of them. To be honest, that’s always the way it’s been for me, “teaching” English, from the most advanced high school to the backwaters school in the sticks. Even if a Japanese person knows English, they seem to be pretty reticient at showing it (that, and, I’m a horrible teacher of English! that could be it).

These students were about to embark on a school trip to America, where they’d study for about 2 weeks at a local college and get to see the sights. So I was to be there as sort of a “first-encounter” native, or something. I went over what to say at the immigration desk, and I told them that even if I was speaking clearly and correctly, that the immigration officer might use more, how shall we say, real English. They’re all like 19 and 20 though, so I don’t expect them to really listen to me, but…they’re 19 and 20, and they’ll be just fine. I told them stuff like how to pay with a credit card and how to easily calculate tips for restaurants, and basically just smile and be happy because that will get you through anything. It’s worked for me!

The teacher was disappointed, wishing that the students would be more excited about this trip. There were some boys napping while I spoke, and girls chatting with their friends. I just sort of figured that they had no idea what it would be like, so it was almost pointless to explain all of this to them. You never really know until you get to a place what it’s going to be like, so it’s a waste of energy to worry about it *tell this to my 21 year old self, itching to go to Ritsumeikan and not getting contact from them for six months lol.

On the way out, we stopped at a tiny farmer’s market the students had set up, with fresh-cut flowers and juicy, sweet-looking tomatoes and peppers. These kids were tan, muscled, and dirty, and they looked liked they knew the land and what they could grow from it. I never knew that kind of stuff. I never even thought about it. I think it’s great that Iwate, still abundant with farmland, has young people around to take care of the next generation. I can’t think of anyone I grew up with that wanted to be a farmer. One of the students chatted happily with the teacher I was with about how they got the tomatoes to turn orange, and what vitamins were in them, and how good for you they were. And it’s just one more proof that being smart has nothing to do with what grade you got in English class.

Two young girls ran up to us and chatted with me and the teacher for a while. They were pleased that I could speak Japanese, and chatted freely and energetically - not a trace of that classic shyness that I always get whenever I try to talk to people in a classroom. And I thought, maybe this is it - it’s not English and it’s not the teaching that’s the problem here. It’s the classroom. Once Japanese people are outside the classroom, outside that huge group of students that they may feel the pressure to conform to, it becomes so much easier to talk to them, even with me being a huge scary foreigner. One of the girls was cradling tomatoes in her shirt and handed me one, and it was the juiciest, sweetest tomato I had ever eaten. I don’t even like tomatoes.

While we were walking through the hallways a group of boys started talking to us, and a loud boy with spiky hair shouted, “HELLO! My name is Shigeki!” in English to me. And then another boy gasped and said in Japanese, “What? No, I’m Shigeki, he’s just playing. He’s Yutaro.”

I called to the first boy in English. “Hey, Yutaro. You lied to me!”

He turned around, shocked. “PARDON ME?” he said in English, mouth agape. He meant it was “excuse me, I didn’t understand,” but it still sort of fit the situation, now didn’t it. Sometimes I feel like what I do is not really that important, but it’s moments like that, those perfectly strange moments, that make my job worth having. Communication is not perfect language skills, it’s something much deeper and more intangible, and I feel once someone realizes that is when they realize the joy of learning another language.

One year ago, I found out I was upgraded to JET.

I had given up all hope; I was at my darkest point. Even as I was setting up an interview for another company, I figured I would fail that too, just like everything else. I was lost. Japan was so far away from me, and something that had seemed to sure and so right was now something so impossibly unattainable. The more I wanted it, the more the dream of living and working in Japan slipped out of my fingers.

Until I got my chance back, that lonely night in a hotel in Boston, like nothing had happened. My fortunes had changed so abruptly that it was almost like…like someone had planned it that way. I don’t know if I believe in God, but it sort of felt like my two months of suffering (which was really nothing in the grand scheme of things) was there to show me something. No matter how much I thought I deserved Japan, I had only just made it. I had eked through by the skin of my teeth. Only now that I realized how hard it was could I really appreciate what was being given to me.

It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to get upset at random things here, to get moody. Heck, I got in a snit yesterday for having no plans this weekend, even though I am exhausted lately and really need a break. Well, I’ve always been moody, but sometimes, especially in the beginning, it was so hard for me to break out of it. Everyone I met was new. I was always trying to prove myself. I was on my own for the first time. A relationship I had been in for years was over. I got a crush on someone where the constant will they or won’t they drove me crazy (don’t lie, i still feel this way). For a while, I started liking someone else who treated me horribly, but in a way, I felt I deserved it. I was lonely. I felt like no one understood me, and that no one ever would.

But…after that JET passed away in January, something changed inside of me. I remembered just how lucky I have it, just to be alive. I remembered how little time we really have. And I remembered just how unbelievably lucky I was to be in Japan, because I had forgotten and taken for granted my job and my life here and the fact that it had been so hard. It’s difficult to remember that sometimes. But everytime something gets me upset, I just take a second, take a walk, take a bike ride, and pay attention to the world around me. I wouldn’t have had a chance to see this, if I hadn’t gotten so lucky. I take another breath. It’s fun here, even if I fail. Even if I am lonely. Even if things don’t go my way. Because I am here.

And that’s all it takes to get me on the right track. Maybe those couple of months last year, when I thought I had screwed everything up and would never get back here, were my reminder. They were a way of telling me that even when things get tough here, it was still so much better than last year, so quit whining and appreciate what you have. I didn’t know it at the time, but I guess I wouldn’t erase those two months for anything.

I used to be pretty desperate for dating tips when I first got to Iwate, and went around buying all the girl magazines I could to see if I could crack the code on Japanese boys. They were different! I thought. They were mysterious! They play by utterly different rules! And since I didn’t have any, you know, Japanese girl friends, I just had to rely on what the likes of Nonno, Anan, and Mina would tell me. And, well. Japanese boys are different than American boys, in many ways. But everyone is different. I’ve met far more shy boys that might not be brave enough to ask a girl out (*if she is foreign and scary) here, but I know a few shy boys at home too. And while I believed every word in those magazines for a time, now I just sort of chuckle when I read them (and I still do read them). According to Anan, my crush likes me +90%, but I just think that it would have worked out already if that was the case, wouldn’t it? So I’ve learned to take them with a grain of salt. The advice is the same as Cosmo anyway; be thinner, be prettier, be willing to do anything to please him, and don’t think about what you might want in the process. In some ways, here it’s worse.

(coming soon!: a post on feminism, and a post on japanese fashion…ie, i’m tired of writing about amanda, amanda, amanda for the moment)

Next time I read an interesting article I might just translate it. I’ve got half a mind of putting up the “how to avoid doing intimate act X” article buried in one of my Nonnos (how appropriate is that title?!) just for giggles. And see, that’s yet another reminder of how good I have it here, as a foreign woman in Japan. I can laugh at or be annoyed with one of these articles about how a “proper woman acts” but then I can put the magazine down and forget about it. There are rules about how I’m supposed to act here, but most of the small ones don’t apply, because people chalk it up to cultural differences (which a lot of the time it is). Boys are still attracted to me in spite of, or maybe because of the fact that I am loud and tend to take the spotlight to myself. There are Japanese girls who act like me, but I think they have a far more delicate balance act than I do - I’m loud and it gets excused because I’m American. A Japanese girl who is loud is made fun of behind her back (well, it could be that I am made fun of too! Who knows?).

I am also lucky in that I can speak good Japanese, am averagely attractive, and am white/normal weight/not poor, and I can’t deny that most of these things are things that I did not work for or earn but I benefit from their privileged status (and let me just say that it’s not like I think those things make me better, but I know they sometimes make it easier for me to participate in society than a person not so lucky). I am respected more than girls my age, and its easy (yet wrong) to chalk that up simply to the fact that I was brave enough to move to another country and speak another language. I see many foreign girls falling into the trap that I used to and still do, of making fun and belittling Japanese girls who act demure and cute and defer to men in every instance, yet that’s not necessarily the Japanese girl’s fault. She was taught to be this way and you can call it “getting into men’s good graces” and get jealous if a girl is better at it than you, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s always the male gaze that we fall under and are judged under. I think it takes a long time to extract yourself from unfair thinking like this and separate what is real from society’s “rules.”

And that’s it! Again, I do want to write a “feminism” post because I have been thinking a lot about it, and studying it and reading up about it. Then again, I still don’t know very much and don’t want to open my mouth unless I have something good to say. It’s just such an interesting thing being a foreign girl in a country that isn’t always so kind to its own women. More thoughts later!

And like, the pictures in magazines are so cute too. So, there’s that.

“Life is like riding a bicycle - in order to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”-Albert Einstein

Honestly, why can’t they sell Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups here? American Junk Food: the number one thing I miss (after people i love and my dog). You just can’t get fat here like you can in the States!

Outside the art museum where I saw an exhibit of Alphonse Mucha’s works. I quite love his style! It’s more illustration than fine art, which was what I wanted to major in when I embarked on my aborted journey to be an art teacher. I always appreciated a stylish line and a bold color/design choice over…I dunno, a hidden message that I could never understand, because I was not Art-Minded, I guess (this is more of a critique of my failings than it is me trying to snub anyone!). In the end, it was for the best that I did not become an artist, but I do miss drawing sometimes. But that’s right, according to that one art professor, I only have “minimal artistic ability.” I guess I just didn’t want to hear that kind of critique day-in and day-out everyday for four years. It’s nice to know that there was an artist out there who made a living painting cute posters with stars and pretty girls on them. Maybe some day I’ll get back to that whole drawing thing myself…

(and before anybody jumps on me, the reason I post so many pictures is not because I want to be a photographer or that I even really like photography. The category is called “a morioka for all seasons” because I think it’s important to show different sides of this place, and to spur me to make more content - although I should probably use a color filter or something, so that I can get called out for being an amateur already!!)

swimming upwards, on odori

I hadn’t contacted the O-san’s since they had taken me on a day trip to Tazawako Lake during Golden Week, where they treated me to cream-puffs and bought me a new tunic with cute little poodles on it. They really were like my second family, and smiled when I said “Tadaima (I’m home)” instead of “Ojama shimasu (Sorry to intrude)” when I entered their house. I appreciate them so much. But I had been busy, and hadn’t sent an email to say thanks. O-san called me up to his office today and gently scolded me, saying they were a bit worried about me, and that “I’m telling you this so you will learn more about Japanese culture, and about our etiquette.” It was like he was saying the reason I hadn’t contacted them was because I was American and didn’t know the rules, not that I was just a young person who was busy caught up in my own life. And it really bothered me. I want it to be my fault, not my culture’s fault. I don’t want to be seen as an ignorant American, I want to be seen as all the other young people in Japan who sometimes neglect to contact the people they care about.

He admitted that even young people these days don’t know “Japanese culture” but it was too late. I had already felt like I had broken a rule that I should have known not to break. I had already done something to prove that I didn’t know enough about this culture that I am living in, and probably would never know enough. And I know I will never fit in completely, and usually I’m okay with that. It’s not my responsibility to act like a Japanese person. But still, I felt upset that I hadn’t, because I felt I had proved the rule about foreigners, and made myself into a stereotype. It’s not a big deal, and he didn’t mean to upset me. But I wish I didn’t have to follow all the rules all the time to get people to accept me. Japanese people break the “rules” all the time and they don’t have to restudy the Laws of Japan, or whatever.

The other day, I met an attractive, charming older man who wouldn’t leave my side, who told me how wonderful I am, and who persisted in asking me on a date. I was flattered by the attention, but I already have someone I like, and I don’t want to ruin that, and he’s too old, and I was intimidated. More than that, something just felt wrong. It just felt so odd, and out of nowhere. He was so persistent even though I had only met him once, at a party. Instead of my heart fluttering, my gut sank and twisted. It was a decidedly unsexy feeling! He sent me a message, asking when I was free, and I replied, “um, can I ask you something? you’re not married…right?”

“Huh? Yeah, I’m married. Is that a problem?”

It’s easy for me to think, yeah. Those stories about Japanese husbands looking for fun outside their marriage sure are true, huh? And yeah, maybe Japanese society makes it a little easier, and little less shameful to be an unfaithful man. There was certainly no one at that party that mentioned to me that he was a married man. I could blame it on him being Japanese, that Japanese men will never be faithful to their wives, that Japanese society is just the way it is, and you can’t change it.

But I know a lot of men here who would never cheat on their wives. They wouldn’t cheat even if their society says it might be kinda okay. And I certainly have no room to throw stones.

No, that guy was just a jerk, all on his own.