Why I believed that I, of all people, would be spared culture shock, I cannot say. Was it my confidence that I was already familiar with the culture into which I was placing myself, or my confidence in my language skills? Was it self-assurance that I could easily and willingly mold myself into whatever a new setting demanded of me; was I overconfident in my open-mindedness? Or was it simply the fact that for twenty-two years, I had never known homesickness despite all of my moves and the changes I had made in my life?
Whatever it was, it led me to the silly position that yes, I was immune to culture shock. I would pack up a bare minimum of belongings, fly off to a foreign country that I had never even visited, let alone called home, and throw myself into a new job that I had never performed in my life. I would magically transform into an English teacher - something I had no training or experience with - and magically acclimate myself to a drastically different life in a drastically different place. And through all of this, I would not become bitter or angry; I would not let my defensiveness or confusion overtake me and color the way I experienced my new and different life. I was so assured of all this that there was no doubt in my mind that it seemed reasonable to expect this kind of reaction to living in a foreign country, even while those around me all warned me of the backlash that was sure to come later if not sooner.
No, culture shock was not for me. I simply was going to be having any part of it.
As my readers can well imagine, this was, of course, a ridiculous assumption. The most surprising part of this story is not that I was hit with culture shock just like every other human being in the world; no, the surprising thing is the amount of time it took to get to me.
I did not experience culture shock when I set foot in Japan. I was not confronted with anger or confusion or bitterness in my first few weeks, nor in my first few months. Of course, I had the normal daily difficulties of life anywhere, but there was no special focus that told me to blame it all on Japan. Even as my friends and colleagues complained of inconveniences and differences in attitude, I felt like I was floating through life, in a strange environment but without the extreme reactions that one might expect. Even I expected more emotional resistance to what I saw and experienced, to the ways in which I needed to change myself and my lifestyle to fit in and live comfortable. Instead, I felt as though I were simply observing what went on around me, filing it away for the future, and moving on.
I did not feel culture shock, that is, until I had taken a break from Japan. Then, my defenses were down; I'd just taken an entire week to relax in a familiar environment, and coming back to wintry Japan after a Hawaiian vacation was like being thrown into freezing water. It was not simply the weather that changed my attitude - I had gone to a place where I could have my own life, where I could be responsible for myself, where I had a car and my autonomy and could make my own decisions about what I wanted to be doing at all times. I wasn't hindered by the limitations that constrained my life in Japan; like a horse free of its saddle, I had never before realized how much I was hemmed in by the whims of public transit and limited availability of familiar comforts. Now that I was free of all of those artificial constraints for a brief period, coming back to them was simply unbearable.
Even as the plane touched down back in Japan, I did not realize that my feelings of dread and annoyance were culture shock. No, I told myself, I'm just sick of it here. I wasn't homesick; indeed, anywhere but Japan was acceptable to me at that point. Culture shock, as I still pictured it, was what happened to someone in denial of their surroundings, someone who just wanted to close their eyes and pretend they were back home where everything was familiar. I didn't care about familiarity or how different the environment was from what I knew back home. I certainly wasn't in denial about where I was or what surrounded me: I saw it with eyes wide open, and I was hating it with a passion I never realized I was capable of.
Suddenly, everything that was a minor inconvenience before I left was turned into a grave insult and an intolerable burden, entirely the fault of Japan. I hated the sound of Japanese, how Japanese women walked with their toes pointed in, how Japanese men styled their hair. I hated the stores' bright fluorescent interiors and the sound of the recording on the bus. The smell of food, the junior high's PA system blaring into my living room, the students' untidy uniforms - these were all things that I could no longer abide. It all needed to stop, immediately.
The directionless anger and hated that I felt upon returning was certainly compounded by genuine complaints in my life. It was winter, and I was freezing. My apartment was in a block of subsidized housing that had no insulation, heat, or hot running water, and I counted myself lucky if the interior temperature rose above 10 degrees Celsius. I slept under five or more blankets (one electric) wearing two layers of pajamas, a hat, and a scarf, and woke up with a perpetual sore throat. I spent my evenings after school soaking in my hot bathtub, which took over an hour to heat. In short, for a person who already cannot stand winter and cold weather, I was utterly uncomfortable and thoroughly miserable.
Combine that general discomfort with a job I could no longer stand - a mix of total disrespect, grating personalities, and no opportunity at all to teach - and my life already had enough genuinely awful stimuli that affected my mood, without introducing actual culture shock into the milieu. But there it was: on top of a poor work situation, I was hating everything and anything Japanese, and blaming it squarely on others.
I had had enough of Japan, of attitudes and assumptions and cultural barriers. I was consumed entirely with Japan-sickness.
It was only after I'd managed to cure myself of the culture shock that I began to realize that's what it was, not some indiscriminate annoyance or bad attitude. It was culture shock, plain and simple. It simply took some reflection for me to grasp that - after all, just as I had been told over and over - each person experiences culture shock differently, and each person at a different time and to a different degree. Those things that drove my friends crazy while I shook my head in bemusement were simply not occurring in the right form, at the right time, to make me insane as well. It took six months of inconveniences, misunderstandings, irritations, and bad experiences to boil and stew inside of me, and finally boil over into a morass of foul attitude when I least expected it.
How, then, I did I find this culture sickness cure? How did I conquer Japan?
By making it my own.
My town, that is. I made my town, my area, my city, my island mine. If I had done this all along, perhaps I would have managed without any culture shock at all, or in a different or less extreme form. Perhaps, instead of whining ineffectually or hiding in my bath, seething with resentment as I shivered and buried myself in a book, I would have simply gotten out and discovered something new and interesting. Then again, I may have simply found something to annoy myself with earlier on, and would have been able to focus my tremendous irritation on that one aspect of Japanese culture.
Instead, I had to learn halfway through the year how to live. I had to get out of the apartment, take the bus in to the city on weeknights, explore the department stores and underground mall and the funky little shops that the people my own age hung out in. I didn't buy anything, but I filled myself with a sense of being active and alive, surrounded by others who all seemed to harbor a definite purpose - whether it was the artists having coffee in the little shop attached to their gallery or simply teenagers on a mission to find new fashion. I was a part of that, even as an observer who was necessarily separated to a certain degree. I was at least making the conscious choice that I wanted to be there, that I wanted to be around these people, that I wanted to direct my energy in this way.
I began to find things then; I found favorite bookstores, favorite boutiques, strange clothes, goldmines of crazy Engrish on t-shirts. I found out-of-the-way coffee shops and rooftop onsen tucked away from the department stores and office towers and bars of the city. I found my favorite parks, my favorite hiding spots, my homes away from home. And with each new thing I found - each new place I discovered that I could be comfortable - my ownership of the place increased accordingly.
My assumed knowledge of my new culture - my years of study of Japanese culture and history - ultimately did little to prevent me from being affected by it, much as I somehow thought I could escape untouched. I was no longer simply studying Japan, though, I was living it, and naturally I would be affected by this interaction and would react, positively or negatively. My ultimate mistake was not realizing this fact, that I was immersed in the culture. I resisted it, stubbornly trying to carry on just as I would if I were in any other place. The reality, however, was that I was living in Japan, and what ultimately helped me to overcome my resistance and to appreciate my host country was to actively engage in it, to actually live my life instead of waiting for it to come to me.
I came to find my own life there in Japan - my favorite area in my city, where most of the foreigners I knew never went, and my little favorite ice cream shop there that served green tea and squash and red bean flavors. My favorite park with the big lake in the middle, with the city stretching out behind it. My favorite bike routes that went past mountains. The far countryside, far away from the bus route, where I could approach the fields and mountains and flowers and there weren't even any cars on the road, just hot wind and oppressing humidity and screaming insects and the sun-bright sky. Getting on a train and just going wherever I pleased, regardless of whether I could convince friends to come with me. Seeing what I wanted to and what responded to me, what I'd want to see and do no matter where I was living, making it not only about "Japan and me" anymore, but just "me living anywhere." I tailored the specific activities I enjoyed in Japan to what I began to discover about myself: the things I valued and wanted and enjoyed no matter where I was.
That was when I began to love Japan again, the way I did when I first arrived and everything was new, only this time it was more intense and more specific. I only wished that it hadn't taken me a whole year to figure that out, because just as I'd come to love it again, I was already packing to leave.