I'll admit it. When I was on the 14-hour flight to Tokyo, I had absolutely no qualms about the sort of cultural shocks and challenges that I would be facing for the next four months. I was cocky. I was calm. I was going to have the greatest Japan experience, ever.
I was even seated next to a girl from Carnegie Mellon who was going to Tokyo for the same study abroad program as me. She spent the majority of the flight cramming for our Japanese placement exam, watching the Japanese television programming, and practicing reading elementary Japanese children's books. Me? I watched "Mean Girls" two and a half times, read three issues of The New Yorker, and slept.
Upon arrival and meeting all 60 of the other American students on my program, I realized that I was pretty much alone in that I wasn't homesick, scared, or panicked. My peers were all outwardly excited, but underneath their nervous laughs and friendly introductions, you could smell their uneasiness. It was not until I met my friend Hana that I began to understand why these other students were absolutely terrified.
Hana and I happened to have grown up in similar homes. We both have a parent who has Japanese blood, grew up in Japan, and speaks fluent, native Japanese. In my case, it's my mother. In Hana's case, it's her father.
We grew up with and have been constantly exposed to some degree of Japan and Japanese culture and, unlike the vast majority of our peers, this was not our first time visiting the country. Even though neither of us is fluent in Japanese, we know enough to get around and communicate efficiently. We were simply comfortable.
Many of the American students on my program came to Japan without ever learning the language aside from a "konnichiwa" or a "sayonara," which is absolutely mind-blowing to me.
I could understand going to a European or Latin American country without knowing the language, but to an Asian country? The Japanese language is the most challenging thing I have ever studied. There are two 46-character alphabets and a third alphabet where you're doing OK if you know 2,000 of its tens of thousands of characters.
These students have not really experienced Japan aside from the occasional movie, anime television show, news broadcast, and college Japanese language class. I couldn't decide if these were some of the bravest people I had ever met, or some of the most deluded. Japanese culture isn't something that's easy for American college students to relate to or quickly assimilate into.
By the end of living in Tokyo for two weeks, the tables soon turned. It suddenly hit me that no matter how many Japanese things we have lying around our house or how many Japanese relatives I may have or how well I speak the language; I will never be entirely welcomed into Japanese society. I will forever be seen as a "gaijin" (foreigner) and therefore will be continually treated in an entirely different manner.
I have come to the conclusion that visiting Japan, regardless if you have Japanese relatives to accompany you or not, is a completely different experience from living there with other Americans. You're not always hopping from friendly hotels and restaurants in the popular tourist areas that treat foreigners extremely well. You're not always meeting up with family friends that want to show you around. It's just you: a big old American.
As uncomfortable as I am talking about racism and discrimination here, it's becoming such an omnipresent factor in our daily lives that it would be ignorant of me not to. Nothing sticks out more than a group of Americans standing a head above everyone else on the subways or cracking up over a good joke in a restaurant.
We get nasty looks from Japanese men and women on a daily basis. They'll think that some of us girls wear skirts that are too short or that we shouldn't be dancing on the sidewalks while listening to our iPods on the way to school. It is true that, on the whole, Japanese women don't wear very revealing clothing or do anything but walk on the sidewalks here, but is that reason enough to glare at us?
Some friends and I were in a restaurant recently -- a place we had been going to at least once a week after school -- when one day, the restaurant owner decided to ban us forever, simply because we were "loud." It was painfully clear that by "loud," he meant "foreigners," because aside from the fact that we were a quiet group of four girls, we were seated next to a table of 10 rowdy, drunken businessmen that produced much more noise than we could. Since then, other American friends of mine have tried to go into that same restaurant, only to be turned away, without an explanation.
There are most certainly incidents of my fellow American peers acting rudely toward Japanese people. A couple weeks ago, I witnessed a member of the U.S. Navy yell English obscenities and snide comments to some Japanese men and women in on the subway, assuming that they had no idea what he was saying to them.
A lot of the students within my program are die-hard Red Sox fans and after the Sox' win, they haven't stopped making racist comments about the Japanese Yankee player, Hideki Matsui.
Hana and I have discussed this many times between the two of us because I think our situation is a unique one. We feel like we're constantly being tested about our loyalty to our different heritages. When we hear Americans making racist comments about the Japanese, our Japanese blood boils and we'll feel upset and insulted. Being Americans, we hate the way we're sometimes looked at and treated by the people here.
And although there are small behavioral changes we, as Americans, should work on, the dancing to the iPods definitely won't be stopping soon.
