Since arriving in Tokyo, several people have asked me this question: Nihon wa dou desu ka? How do I find Japan?
A simple question, but one that until recently had been quite tricky to answer.
At first I was excited to be here, of course: this is my first time travelling solo. Actually it’s my first time travelling at all. The longest time I’ve ever spent away from Blighty before was two weeks. One fortnight really does not qualify as ‘travelling’.
I spent a month or two in Japan when I was 1 year old, but I don’t think it counts when you’re totally oblivious to everything around you.
So here I was, last Saturday, in Tokyo all alone. Daunting, yes, exciting, very much so. I had my backpack, my hostel details and a handy Tokyo subway app on my iPhone. By the way O2, your roaming charges are outrageously extortionate >:(
I found my hostel in Asakusa with relative ease. I even used a bit of Japanese to buy my ticket for the train. Then, backpack safely stowed away in the hostel, I went for a wander around Asakusa.
I stopped for lunch at an izakaya (traditional-style Japanese restaurant) and ordered oyakodon because I love it. Felt slightly smug about ordering in Japanese and asking where the toilet was too (‘that’s some impressive language skills you have there Maya’, ‘why thank you Maya’). I took a quick look round the Sensoji temple – Tokyo’s oldest temple, and chuckled to myself at a stand selling extremely phallic ‘choco-bananas’.
Later that evening I returned to the temple with a girl I’d met in the hostel. We looked at the market stalls on Nakamise Street, ate sushi from a conveyor belt restaurant and checked out a department store all the while feeling bemused and intrigued by the strangeness of Japan.
Although, my weak grasp of the language coupled with my previous experiences of Japan made me the expert of the two of us and so I took on the role of interpreter and guide and felt pretty confident with it.
But the confidence rapidly waned when I moved into my ‘gaijin house’ in Gokokuji and started at school.
My hopes of meeting lots of new people were dashed. I found I was the only person on my course (private lessons – sweet! but no new friends – sucks to be me) and my new housemates had very different schedules to mine so I rarely saw them.
Loneliness while travelling solo is to be expected but when you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language and few natives speak your language, you can’t read anything and you constantly feel a bit special needs, the loneliness can become unbelievably oppressive.
Also, it quickly dawned on me how very un-Japanese I am, or at least, how very English I am. There was, and still is, a lot that I don’t understand about Japanese culture, mannerisms and etiquette.
I guess nurture rules over nature.
So, at that point if you’d asked me how I was finding Japan, I would have replied that it’s a very difficult place to acclimatise to. Which is a mild way of saying I hated it and was having a horrible time.
But the first few days in a new place are always hard to adjust to and as my friends and family told me, all I had to do was give it time and things would get better.
They were right.
Friends of friends and Japanese family members have begun getting in touch with me and the loneliness has abated. My grasp of the language has strengthened (I’m not like fluent now or anything, it’s only been a few days!) and being in Tokyo feels exciting again.
Things are better and now I’m looking forward to experiencing Japan and hopefully gaining a better understanding of Japanese people.
Nihon wa dou desu ka? I’d have to say sugoii!
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