What Writing Isn't?

Writing, in it's basest form, is a form of expression that is meant to be shared. After all, like the tree that falls without a sound, does a piece of writing really exist if no one is there to read it? Hopefully, this blog will become something that exists for posterity, hence the "clever" title.

To some of us, our home countries are the fabric of our entire universe. Those other places we hear about exist, but only on the news, and in the papers that interest too few these days. In my experience, Americans are especially guilty of this for a number of reasons. The one I like the best is something that I heard from another student here at Kansai Gaidai: she said that America is like a country filled with a bunch of little countries. Our world is already so diverse and complex in and of itself that it's rather easy to forget about the larger picture. The larger picture, however, is spectacular.

For weeks and weeks before leaving the States, everyone kept asking if I was excited to go to Japan and all I could say was "more nervous than excited." I was going to a completely new country with a limited amount of linguistic skill and it left butterflies in my stomach. Those butterflies suddenly drank a 5-hour energy the moment I showed up at the gate for my flight to Tokyo from LAX. Nearly every chair was full and it was potentially the smallest accumulation of Caucasians I had seen in my entire life. But even this didn't prepare me for the gate in Tokyo.

Imagine you're in a sizable lecture class. You're one of the first students to arrive on the first day of class. As the rest of the students show up, you are the first thing in the room their eyes are drawn to before they sit down. After ten minutes, you suddenly realize it's because you're different. Your entire life, you were counted normal; the 2.4 nuclear family kind of normal without a single stray thought out of the socially acceptable box, but now, it's as though you've grown horns and turned purple.

This is what it was like sitting in the Tokyo airport, waiting for my connection to Kansai International Airport. I was THE foreigner. Every time an announcement was made in English, I could swear I felt the entire room look at me, as though they were saying "You're the only one that needs this and we KNOW." You really don't appreciate the culture diversity of the US until you're in a place where there is nearly none.

The culture shock dramatically lessened once I walked to the North Exit at KIX and suddenly a small group of clearly weary, smelly international travelers greeted me (and I'm not kidding, most complained about being without showers). Suddenly, there was more than a handful of people just like me. Finland, Bulgaria, Canada, Lithuania: they were all just like me, give or take the American euphemisms.

Now, almost a week in, Seminar House 1 has become my new Sawtell (my dorm on Bennington's campus). Although we're from all over the world, quite literally, everyone here is becoming one big family. Our Japanese residents are excited to meet us, to share their culture with us, and to live among us; and we all reciprocate their feelings. It's a long way from my guarana-hyped butterflies of the LAX airport gate. It's actually comfortable, warm and already one of the best experiences of my life.

What else I've learned this week: Japanese banks have to be the strictest institutions in the world, little old ladies in Kyoto will run you over with their bicycles, bread in Japan comes most often in packs of six, bring an umbrella, some Japanese children love to yell "hello" and "bye bye" at you, and お父さん is good at the hula.