Changing Impressions

When I first started to join groups, I stood from the outside...

I think that my changing impression around my end of 4 months in Japan is losing all my previous impressions or opinions. I had read so many books, seen so many shows…I study East Asia…

But maybe I could have never been more wrong.

Just learning cultural aspects from the past are not good enough and even though I tried to keep in tune with Japanese pop media it only obscured my view from all the different kinds of people that make up this country.

When I first came I felt like there was glass wall between me and every Japanese person I saw, I silly I know…they’re people too just me. But I don’t know how to explain it.

Maybe seeing everyone, made me realize I was in Japan. Through this glass I tried to communicate and even though I was showing who I truly was I still left something in between us because maybe even after all my studies I didn’t know how to interact interculturally. But that is what I learned…in this generation it is not that different and everyone is so globally aware…or affected even if they don’t know it. We are mesh and blend together. Of course there are still ethnic differences that differ us but not divide. Americans are still generally loud and out going on a wide scale here and the Japanese still express aimai- or ambiguity in communication. But I think I let these differences act as barricades. And my changing impression is that we’re not that separate after all, everything in my culture isn’t opposite of Japan’s but expressed differently. I mean I know this sounds like talking in circles but I hope you can visualize this. I stopped seeing the people of Japan as objects and as no one different from myself.

Because they speak Japanese and I have studied Japan’s history it seemed more so they were subjects than my fellow man kind even if I have never forcefully ever thought about it like that.

I noticed that the Japanese people make mistakes too, that even though there is the rigid stereotype of everyone working hard and not being so scattered in public, people still slip up and drop something, speak to loudly and most definitely…fall out of line.

That even though there is social distance and it breaks apart the language, they still physically touch often and are eager to become closer than whatever I have studied about in Japanese cultural linguistics before.

There are so many types of people and luckily for me I happen to spend time with Japanese friends that do not care if I am foreign or not, and unlike the stereotype that Japanese want to collect gaijin friends they probably would prefer I was Japanese so they wouldn’t have to keep translating for me.

In this crowd I can just sink into the society and I don’t get treated differently and this one of the main reasons why I was able to shatter the glass. Because even though I could see everything in the world around me, didn’t mean I was a part of it.

In my first post I wrote

“The transportation and that when I look at everyone’s face I wonder where in this place they fit into and where are they going. How do they live here, and how can I also? ”

I try to think if I have answered my question or not and more or less I think I know.

But then I started to join in...

I think I was already setting myself up in the beginning pointing out how everything was difference opposed to what was familiar to me even though it is in a different country.

And maybe now instead of thinking how I can live here as well, I…now…just…simply do.

And perhaps a new foreign student or passing traveler in the station will think the same thing about me as I did in the beginning.

When someone said something that surprised me or if I notice something to make me think “how very un-Japanese” then I really wasn’t immersing and was just standing on my side of the looking glass. My first impressions which set up how I would live and act here have changed or vanished from the people I have meet that have showed me the diverse and true sense of Japanese people that cannot be labeled or grouped, as I felt in beginning. And that is the whole point.

Break my own stereotypes...

My first impressions where so concerned on how to not be an outsider that I made myself one, and now my impressions of the Japanese people have changed because I take the plunge without bias opinions to set up my new friendships creating a new type of impression that is one without words with definitions to feelings.

I stopped using my first impressions as guide lines about how to join this society

and finally was able to feel what my true impressions of this society were after I experienced with out barriers of what I thought I saw...