Hi all! Sorry I disappeared! I'm in Japan now, studying in Kyoto. Thought it might be neat to do a kind of informal blog to let people see what it's like. Skip it if you think it's boring or please comment and ask question if you're interested.
Yeah,
WEEK 1: ARRIVAL
Memory Lapse, Culture Shock, and Time Travel
I wake up in a foreign airport and the sounds coming from the dark beyond frighten me, send me into a panic stricken phase. Through the groggy grayness of an addled and tarnished mind, brought on by the passage of leagues of land in mere hours, my ears sharpen to interpret the baffling sounds speaking out to me, and I cannot comprehend, cannot begin to unravel the words. I panic.
The lids of my eyes whip upwards like broken window shutters, with audible frip!s as they hit my eyebrows. As cold sweat begins to bead on my forehead and my heart jackhammers within me, I am gripped and consumed by an overbearing terror:
I've fallen asleep and woken up and I've COMPLETELY forgotten Japanese!
I jump from my seat with a strangled gurgle in my throat. And now, my brain at full-function, memories flood back into my mind, back into the private movie theater right behind my eyes: departure from Salt Lake at midnight, the long, dark, dreary overnight flight across the Pacific...our layover in Taipei.
Oh yeahhh....I now stand in Chiang Kai-shek airport in Taiwan, listening to a receptionist make flight announcements in Cantonese. Baffled travelers look with wrinkled brows and make disapproving clucks of the tongue at the obnoxious American standing a gaff in the middle of the waiting area. I don't care; I count to ten:
ichi! ni! san! shi! go! roku! shichi! hachi! kyuu! juu!
Rock on! Still got it! I sit back down in my seat, a refreshing relief washing over my body and massaging my nerves, and I go back to sleep.
Four hours later and I look out the window, out over the sleek white wing down onto the sapphire water. Lush dark green trees border the bay, crowding the shore, like so many natives out for a day at the beach. My excitement and anticipation swell in bounds.
I can feel Japan, feel Japan getting closer and closer. As we near KIX, my flight through the air is not only driven onwards by the colossal engines strapped on the underside of the plane, but also by the years of strife and determination, of dedication and hardship, that have allowed me to get here. Three years of college, forty hours a week at a job I hated, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans and debt, night after night of sleepless study working, working at this language: all for this.
The smile reaches beyond my ears.
We land at noon exactly, and within ten minutes I'm stepping onto Japanese soil, bounding forward and closer to that infamous first day of the rest of my life, the beginning of everything, the great adventure.
Almost immediately I hear the high-pitched ping! ping! ping! play on an overhead speaker that runs before any public announcement, that warm, inviting jingle that sounds like it just wants to take you and give you a hug. It's so nostalgic, so perfect, so...Japan. I know I'm here. This is Japan.
I play the ultimate role of the tourist as I collect my bags: gawking at everything with my head titled back at an awkward ninety-degree angle, catching one or two words out of every twenty or so that are announced, slowing sounding out basic kanji and playing the mad-lib game with katakana. I relish it all.
I've arranged for a shuttle to take me from the airport in Osaka to my dorm in Kyoto. As I descend down the escalator, a primly dressed man in a uniform holds a placard in hand, my name written on it. I walk up sparingly, and slowly announce myself, "watashi wa burodi makerubi desu." I am greeted with the deepest bow I have ever seen and the bags are ripped from my hands. I am escorted to a shuttle idling at the curb. The driver gives me heart-felt smiles, and as we head towards Kyoto, drives his mouth faster in Japanese than he does the car. I catch little of it, feeling much like a train has hit me. He sees this and switches to very simple English to match my very simple Japanese. We have a pleasant conversation, lots of "ii tenki desu ne."'s from me, and many remarks like, "That is Osaka Bay," from him, or "That is Hatayama Building." Nothing substantial, but cheerful all the way.
An hour and a half later, we pull up to a squat, three-story building. An old man stands crookedly on the porch waving at the shuttle. I turn in my seat to see at whom he is waving: no one. I look at the driver; he does not wave back. It gradually dawns on me the man is waving at me. I tentatively wave back.
The shuttle stops and the driver jumps from the car, practically diving through the window, to have my bags out of the back before I even open the door. He bows again and then speeds off, leaving me, the old man, and my bags.
The old man smiles warmly and rattles off in Japanese. I smile too and speak broken, probably unintelligible, Japanese. He grabs my large suitcase to carry up the few steps inside, and gets it only inches off the ground. "totemo omoi desu ne." he says, contemplates for a second, and then grabs the toiletry bag that sits atop of it. "I'll take this one," he grins (I forget the exact Japanese but I know that's what he said), and we laugh jovially as we go inside.
He runs me through the procedures of life at the dorm, all in Japanese. I get the gist only. I tell him where I'm from, my hobbies, etc, in my basic Japanese, filled with ee's and eeto's and 'uhh's and 'unn's.
Once I've settled in, I abandon the room and literally run to town, ready to dominate Japan with all the Japanese I've learned and mastered. After three years of study, I ought be pretty fluent about now. I walk down the street, chest puffed out with confidence, head held high in the air. It should take me about a half-hour or so to adjust and move out of broken Japanese mode into normal, wooing, seductive Brody mode.
Two hours later: I lie on my bed. My head pounds around the room; my nerves hold on for dear life. My eyes don't close, stuck open as if they are absorbed in headlights, watching as the semi comes charging towards them, helpless and forlorn.
I am shocked and broken, sad and defeated. I figured my Japanese was eh, but this eh? Eh doesn't describe it. I need something even more primal, a grunt or growl which contains shame and dejection, pain and agony and misery. A primordial cry from the time before the written word, one which I could not transcribe here.
Two hours on the town in Japan and I could not handle it any more. Whoever said languages are living, breathing things could not have produced a better metaphor. Japanese is a thriving, thrashing hulk of Greek god-like superheroism. It had its way with me, thrashing the confidence I built with my little textbooks and audio CDs, eating the little phrases and sayings I learned out of my pocket-sized travel dictionaries. Japanese owned me, rocked me, turned me upside down, inside out.
Now's about when it hits. When reality descends, falls on you like a boulder, pounding, smashing, breaking. Not only the language, but the culture as well. Everything feels so different, I feel so foreign, so utterly alone in a vastly populated city. How can I do this?, I question myself. I look at the ceiling for guidance, my heart sad and shriveled.
How can I do this? How can I do this?
How can I NOT do this?
This is what I wanted, what I want. I've worked my heart out to be here and now I finally am. The dream, cliche and all. It really does work out.
I force myself up. I jump from the bed, grab my things: my wallet and my keys. I do some pushups and pump myself up. I yell Banzai! and run back out to town.
On my adventures in town I had spotted a McDonalds. Fast food. Perfect.
Why? Because I know how to order. It was a JPOD lesson, one I know well. I stride in through the door, ready to take back my confidence.
I stand back as all the people at the counter yell irrashaimase! at me. I run through my head what will happen, as if I'm planning a military raid on an enemy weapons cache. Ready, I step up and start, slowly, "watashi wa---
"ahwr;ehaoihroiha uiohraouh" The girl machine gun fires at me. "What?!" I say in English, disconcerted and lost. Remembering what country I'm in, I say, "Moo ichi--- I'm cut off again, albeit friendly, with "afhk;hgftioahihahioomeshiagarisomethingsomethingsomething." I have no idea until I remember the JPOD lesson. She's asking me if I'm going to eat here! "
TENNAI DE! I yell in triumph. Then I meekly add, desu, in a mouse-like voice, remembering my manners.
The rest goes downhill like a snowball. I grow embarrassed and nervous, forgetting everything I know, even how to read katakana. I end up getting my food through the point and grunt method. As she counts the change I hand her, I can only laugh and shake my head; I expected it to be rough, but that was ridiculous. Later, at nine, I'm in bed. I hear buoyant voices outside my door, readying to go out to pain the town red. I'm too glum to join. I go to sleep, depressed.
Yet, when I wake, I am immediately struck with a revelation, the kind accompanied by trumpet blasts and sunrays pouring down on my head and naked little cherubs: the whole she-bang-a-bang.
I'M AT ROCK BOTTOM!
Hurray!
While this may sound bad, believe you me, it's not. I've hardly felt a more comforting feeling in my life. Why? What does it mean? It means the only way is up. I'm now in the dark, and from here it will only get brighter, lighter, more divine and beautiful. I am only in for more adventure and wonderment, knowledge and insight.
After all, that's what it's all about, isn't it? Life, I mean. Where would be if it was easy? My Japanese can only progress from here. And when school starts next week, it will progress by leaps and bounds. And what a thing to do: learn it in Japan.
I've definitely suffered culture shock. At first it was electrocution, incapacitating me. But now it is more like...like the shock that sparks people on towards greatness. The kind that makes your hair stand. You know Einstein had it: just look at his picture. And we know he did pretty well. And what about the professor from Back To The Future? He had wicked electrocue hair, standing up every which way, and man, he invented time travel. Did you hear me? Time Travel.
Okay, it's nothing like that. But it illustrates my point: you have to laugh off all the mistakes you're going to make.
And culture shock is definitely a good thing. It pushes you on, gives you motivation and reason. It gives you purpose, both in your goals and in yourself. It drives you through endless study for that one day when you can go into McDonalds and order with ease, with suave and polish. It integrates you into society, into that living and breathing language. It takes you from the textbook into the word, the world.
Great things start from a shock: awesome spike hair do's, electricity...time travel. Take the culture shock and let it drive you onwards. Take it with a smile. Spike your hair, put on your shades, and take it with a smile.
ganbatte!
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). I guess it must be really hard for you now but listening and speaking Japanese all day will work wonders, right? 
