Anniversary Musings

We have some new teammates who arrived last month.  As always, with a new family, we see afresh the strange, hard and different things about living in Japanese culture.  They bump up against things that are just a normal part of life to us…but when we see them struggling, it’s not too hard to think back to when we bumped up against such things too.  In fact, since our 22^nd anniversary of life in Japan is approaching, it’s made me think way back to how things were back then.  And I have to say, things have come a LONG way since 1990!  Notable things I remember:

·         We had a home computer, but it was a monster of a thing, and I think we had to know DOS to use it.  Haha!!  Did we know DOS?  NO!  Thus, computer use was a synonym for FRUSTRATION!

·         To stay in touch with our family, supporters, and friends, we HAND WROTE letters.  Yes…individually to each one.   During language school, we did that every month or two—hand written letters to over 100 people! 

·         Phoning was expensive; we called our parents once a week for 10 minutes…that’s all the verbal communication we had.  There was no skype, face time, blog, video conferencing, or any other cheap/free calling+video thing back then.  Of course we could take our film to the photo developing store, wait a week, and then pick up our pictures, choose a few good ones and send them.  In a hand-addressed envelope.  Usually with a HAND WRITTEN letter. 

·         In Japan, the mailman doesn’t pick up outgoing mail from your mailbox.  So the whole HAND WRITTEN letter process would culminate in a trip to the post office.  I still wish they would pick up—but since the mailmen ride mopeds, I can see how they just don’t have room to carry a bunch of out-going mail! 

·         We lived in a summer cabin in the Japanese Alps.  We arrived there on January 1^st, and I had never in my life been so cold!  You could see the ground through the boards of the floor…every morning when we woke up there was iced formed in the bottom of the sink.  Brrrrr…just thinking of it gives me a chill.

·         Until our shipment arrived, and with it our American stacked washer and dryer, I used the Japanese washer in our summer cabin.  It was OLD.  It had a double drum.  You washed the clothes and rinsed them in one drum, then pulled them out, soaking wet, and crammed them down in the other drum to spin.  When the spin cycle ran, the whole machine vibrated so much, it would move across the floor half a foot or so! 

·         Oh, and drying our clothes?  Well, we had a nice supply of clothespins and hangers in our cabin.  There was another cabin next door that had a dryer, and we were free to use it.  So I would load up my wet laundry, put on my snow boots, coat, hat and gloves, and wade through the snow to the other house to use the dryer.  Sometimes when I’d go back to get the laundry, the pilot light would have gone out, and the clothes would still be wet.  Laundry was one of the most stressful activities of those early days.

·         Food was another issue.  I didn't know how to prepare any Japanese food.  And of course there was no allrecipes.com to refer to.  So every trip to the grocery store was a learning experience.  I spent many hours pouring over the catalog of the Foreign Buyers Club, a business that imports international foods.  And we spent many dollars ordering those must-have items like cream of chicken soup, Cheerios, baby cereal, chocolate chips, etc, etc, etc.  These days many foods are readily available, and we don’t even need them anymore; everyone in our family prefers Japanese food.

Well, this trip down memory lane could go on and on…I could mention the medical system, driving, car ownership, house hunting, and endless other experiences that are either hard or different.   Wow!  It’s no wonder our friends are finding each day an interesting experience (read:  challenge!). 

The good news for them is that you do eventually adjust to all of these differences.  And while you might continue to PREFER the American way, you can enter into the Japanese way.  On the other hand, you might wake up one day and realize you have come to truly appreciate and even prefer the Japanese way of doing things. 

I think one of the keys to adjusting is to view it all as an adventure.  Because you rarely run across anything that truly is a matter of life and death—it’s all mostly about preferences and what we are used to. 

As for me, when I remember back to the way it used to be, my first reaction is, “Wow!  That is a lot of change in the life of someone as young as me!”  And my next thought is, “Oh…maybe I am not as young as I think!”  Happy 22-year anniversary to us!