ダニエルの冒険

I’m just after finishing my packing, punctuated by lunch with Wana, the Romanian girl I met in Frankfurt before I got on the Nagoya flight. I didn’t get the chance to meet her again until today, but what she described as “symmetry” (starting and finishing the trip with the same person), was a nice point. Most of the foreigners I know in Japan are either here on short-term visits or are studying in language schools, neither of which provides much opportunity for really living in Japan with Japanese people in a Japanese environment. Wana, however, is married to a Japanese man and is studying Japanese by herself, so she has lots of insights that my usual foreigner friends don’t have. As such, it was great to talk to her and we had some really interesting conversations about what we like, but mostly about what we don’t like, about Japan and Japanese people.

Andy, one of my American friends, in fact, the one who’s going to take my cutlery and such off my hands, let me use his bike today to go to and from the school and the shopping mall, so I was able to get a lot done. Some last minute shopping and mobile phone contract cancellation research pretty much filled up my schedule today after the lunch. Actually, I only came back from the lunch about four hours ago but it feels so much longer since I’ve been so busy today. To get the phone cancelled I needed to get some paperwork sorted out to give Andy my consent to cancel the contract and the school let me use their computers, printers and photocopiers to do that. Last Thursday I gave the academic administration office a box of sweets to thank them for their help with various bits and pieces over the term so they were delighted to help me out (not that they wouldn’t be anyway).

When I was getting the last of my souvenirs today at SEIBU at AEON (they love capital letter names here), the sales assistant asked where I was from and I told her that I was from Ireland. The other sales assistant heard this and while the first was wrapping for me he approached me and told me that in university he had studied Irish folklore. Apparently he was studying English and had always had an interest in Japanese ghosts, monsters and other mythical beings and wanted to put those together, so hearing that Ireland had faeries and such, he chose that as his subject of study. He seemed delighted to meet and Irishman and I told him about the fairy fort across from Niall’s house and that sort of thing.

I had dinner last night with my private lesson teacher (let’s called her Koto-chan… there are so many names to call people by here) and her friend. We tried getting into Yama-chan’s but we didn’t have reservations anywhere and Kanayama (place near Nagoya) was really crowded so we kept trying a few places until we got to a really classy (therefore expensive) restaurant beside some hostess bars. The food was really great and the conversation was even better. Koto-chan’s friend is from Fukuoka, on the most southern major island of Japan, and apparently the women there are very traditional in how they treat their husbands. It was interesting hearing how she said she could never tell her partner about his bad points and hearing her reasoning for that. I gave arguments for expressing your feelings like a foreigner and she gave arguments for keeping them to yourself like a Japanese and I learnt a lot. The conversation I had with Wana over lunch today overlapped in some areas and it was refreshing to hear another foreigner annoyed about the Japanese habit of keeping comments to oneself all the time. It often just ends up with one person deciding “ok, I’ve had enough” and breaking off their friendship, without giving the other person a chance to know what is it that they’re doing to annoy their partner (and probably lots of other people too).

We also got to talk about 三歩下がって (“three steps behind”), the name for the Japanese idea of the woman keeping three steps behind her husband. Koto-chan’s friend spoke of how she would want to support her husband and build him up, so wouldn’t say anything bad to him. Wana pointed out how this is true, but at the same time it’s foolish to underestimate the strength of Japanese women, and that they actually always get their partners to do what they want in the end, even without saying it.

I’ve really grown so much since I’ve come here and I understand people, especially Japanese people, obviously, a lot better. Living by myself isn’t the reason. I feel that if I lived at home I could still have made the same progress, but it’s speaking with so many people from so many places with so much experience in so many different areas. I wonder if I can do the same in America.

Well, I’d better hand over these bits and pieces to Andy.