We Live Where We Are

Reverse Culture Shock

I'm going to go on the record here and make a few predictions about what I'll be thinking when Julianna and I come home from Japan in August.

"No one is staring at me."
Imagine, for a moment, that you are waiting for a bus. Across the street a Hitler impersonator in drag is tying balloon animals for an imaginary crowd of no one. Imagine a man with backwards-jointed faun knees doing backflips outside the post office. Imagine, then, the rubbernecking pandemonium of Amazonian nudist beauties lining vast stretches of America's highways in protest of the Iraq war. In Japan, I illicit more stares than all three. I have provoked deep gasps of amazement and impromptu height comparisons with complete strangers. In a way, I will miss being perceived as different. However, the "otherness" of my appearance has also led to wary stares, never more apparent than when I'm taking public transportation. "The Stare" is an unavoidable feature of life in Japan for a foreigner, and I have a feeling I'll either love the slinking anonymity of being back among blond-fronded giants, or I'll have a mild identity crisis over not being noticed. It's like Naomi Watts in I Heart Huckabees: "Stop looking at me. Don't look at me. No, look at me. Please everybody look at me!"

"Everyone is red and fat and poorly dressed.
I have to hand it to the Japanese for being slim, trim, and generally sharp-looking people. In America, the girl out shopping in her paw-print-on-the-ass sweat pants is a virtual pandemic. Transported to Japan, her laissez faire fashion sense would be brutally and deservedly dismantled.

"I just spoke in Japanese to the waitress."
This happened already, actually, when Juli and I were home for Christmas. Straight off the plane my parents took us to The Olive Garden, where I bumped into a waitress and repeatedly mumbled "sumimasen" (I'm sorry) while making mini self-depreciating head bows. For a few months I'll probably make a gutteral "uhnn" when I mean "yes," and please don't stare at me if I bob my head like a disconcerted bird when I'm talking on the phone.