10 days ago I moved to Japan and everything I do is at least 10% harder now and sometimes that really sucks.
Ok, glad I got that off my chest.
My husband, Andrew, is an employee of a large international company that has asked him to spend 18 months in Japan working with and learning from the team here. This is both a huge opportunity for his career and an exciting opportunity for us to drastically change everything about our lives. So, I quit my job, we sold our cars, sold or stored most of our belongings, broke our lease, said goodbye to our friends and family, and here we are.
But I’ve done this before so its like…no big deal, right? I studied abroad in Shanghai my junior year of college, and that was pretty exciting, so when I graduated from college, I packed my belongings and set off on a one-year contract to teach English in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, China. If you’ve never heard of Shijiazhuang, it is just a small town of about 10 million people and the capital of Hebei province. And if that description doesn’t help, we can just say it is kind of close to Beijing and call it a day. Before I ever had my own apartment, debts, bills, or almost any life experience in the United States, I was out there adulting, but in Chinese. There were some pretty heavy highs and lows that year, but it didn’t seem hard.
So, in an effort to help myself understand what is going on here that is so HARD, wrap my head around it, and move on so I can start having “happy everyday” aka my favorite Chinglish saying, I am making a list. Type-A homies rejoice.
- When I moved to China, I had studied Mandarin for four years including my semester abroad that was exclusively an intensive Mandarin program – no other classes, just four hours of Mandarin every day, five days per week. When I moved to Japan, I had studied Japanese (half-heartedly) four hours per week for three months. My Japanese is terrible. I can ask where the bathroom is, I can tell people I like fish, I can describe how many rooms my house has. That is pretty much it. So, that’s pretty hard.
- When I moved to China, both for study abroad and for my teaching contract, I had a built-in network. First it was the other students I went to school with, then it was the other teachers I went to school with. I was surrounded by people who were doing the same thing I was, experiencing the same ups and downs of living in a new place. Moving to Japan, Andrew’s company has what I’m calling the “brick wall” rule: dependents of the employee (me) come to Japan two weeks after the employee, no exceptions. From what I understand, for years employees have tried and failed to kill the brick wall rule to no avail. So, instead of transitioning into our new life together as a team, Andrew and I packed, moved, and dealt with all of the ups and downs alone. On top of that, the work culture at Andrew’s company is, well, Japanese. He is expected to work overtime every day except Wednesday and Friday. That means he is out the door at 7:30am every day and most days returns home around 9pm. I arrived in Japan on a Sunday night, Andrew had work Monday, so for the most part we are still experiencing very separate struggles. I spend a lot of time alone, or trying to lob broken Japanese sentences at shop clerks. Andrew spends a lot of time at work, I’m assuming also lobbing broken Japanese sentences at his coworkers.
I’ll be honest, leaving it at I can’t talk to Japanese people because I don’t know Japanese and I can’t talk to non-Japanese people because I don’t know any seems heavy enough for one blog post. It feels really good to complain about it, but if you have made it this far into my long form rant about how hard my amazing, healthy life of privilege is, then you deserve a few good points too. So, some of the highs of living in Japan so far –
- Everything I have eaten so far has been delicious. Convenience store food, restaurant food, the few homemade meals I have scraped together – all delightful. And if you know anything about me, you know that all I care about is food. Available ingredients are good quality and there are at least three grocery stores to choose from within 10 minutes of our apartment. When it comes to food, I am very much a happy camper here in Japan.
- Our shipment of belongings arrived on my second full day here, so we have all of our things including bicycles (!!) so I have the freedom to go anywhere I want all day long.
- On that note, Andrew picked a pretty killer apartment for us. It is much larger and much nicer than I expected it to be.
- Our first Christmas in Japan! During the 14 days Andrew spent alone in Japan, he was able to track down and set up a Christmas tree in our apartment so that my very first moments in our new home were festive and maybe a little, like, teary-eyed. We opened presents together Christmas morning. Sure, Andrew had to work on Christmas. But! Once he did get home, we SUCCEEDED at going to an unfamiliar restaurant with no pictures or English on the menu and enjoying a delicious meal.
Okay, ending the novel here. Andrew set me up with a playdate with his coworker’s wife tomorrow, so who knows, I could have ONE FRIEND pretty soon. Anything is possible.
