a badly punctuated stream of consciousness

the gaijin needs to vent

Well , I’m sitting in the ‘lounge room’ in my 3rd host family’s house at 3pm on Sunday. This room is just outside my bedroom, which is in fact a bedroom because it has a real bed, not a futon, and the reason I’m sitting in it is because it’s warmer here. Usually if I sit in my room with the door open the heater warms both rooms, but I was sitting on my bed (such luxury) shivering and I finally gave up and decided to come and sit near the heater. I said the room was a lounge room, but given the fact that it only has one wicker chair, I guess lounge is the wrong word. Anyway, it’s the room with all the cds in it, and bookshelves, and full of grown-up children’s old school work.

This third host family is a ‘baa-chan and jii-chan’ family. Which means grandma and grandpa family, but they don’t actually have any grandkids yet so I feel it is incorrect to label them that. They have one daughter, Yaeko, who is about 30 I think, and lives in Kanazawa, about half an hour’s drive away (such a long way in Japan, which I thought was reasonable, until I realised that it’s half an hour’s drive at 60km/h, which is certainly not nearly as far as Yeppoon-Rocky, and so once again I can’t help but scoff when people say it’s far.) and a son who lives in Nagoya who I won’t meet. Did talk too him on the phone the other night though…that was a bit weird. Here foreign girl, talk to our son who you’ve never met on the phone.

Anyway, the couple are very nice, probably mid-50’s and the house is lovely and quiet compared with the previous one (which was filled with 7 year old boy-ness). It’s smaller than the last house, which they keep apologising for, but I hardly even notice because I have my own space, not just physically, but mentally as well. And the last two weeks have been spent in recovery from the physical and mental stress and exhaustion of prac, illness and living with children. I have been attending the local Komatsu College, which is more like a TAFE than a University, which has been great because all 6 of us have been together. It is probably a bit of a disadvantage for our language skills to be always together speaking English, but I really have appreciated it mentally and emotionally. Not only because sometimes you just want to bitch about the whole experience, and not only because it’s nice to be able to communicate without having to think a million miles a second, every second of every day, but also because it’s lovely to just be together and not take everything seriously. A good part of the first 3 days were spent giggling uncontrollably, sometimes because of genuinely humorous occurances, but more often just because! Little things would set us off and we’d be laughing for hours. I think we did scare quite a few of the Japanese people around us then but again, I don’t care, because I, and I think all of us, really really needed the release.

So it’s been a fairly pleasant two weeks for me. I do want to go back a little bit further and cover finishing prac and last weekend with the 2nd host family, and then to detail all the really awesome cultural things I’ve experience in the last 2 weeks, but right now I don’t really feel like it. Because while the last 2 weeks were very comfortable and as close to happy as I think I can feel here, the last 2 days have been a bit less happy unfortunately. This isn’t to do with anything in particular except a normal fluctuation in mood probably. And weekends, as I think I’ve said before, are always a bit harder because there is more time to think. And also, Friday was the ‘one month to go’ day, which is hard because while it is so close, there is still a way to go. Probably being with the 5 other girls from uni has also cracked my little bubble of ‘don’t think about home’ which has meant that I’ve started to get very impatient to be home. And I’m not sure if this feeling will dissipate as the last bout of homesickness did when I got better again and got back to the business of school, or if it will just stay until the end. The fact that I’m not actually sick now, and that this isn’t a feeling of unhappiness or misery with the present situation but rather an intense impatience to be back in my ‘real life,’ makes me think that it might be something I just have to put up with for the next month. Which would suck, because I’d just started allowing myself to think that maybe this trip wouldn’t be discoloured with the misery of homesickness like the Italy trip was. Maybe I’d be able to actually genuinely enjoy it for 90% of them time, except when I was actually ill, when of course my mood would be affected.

But unfortunately at the moment I’m feeling impatient to get home and am in another of my fed-up-with-this-place moods. The reason I think I’ve been feeling this way is because of a few experiences I’ve had in the last few days. Experiences that are simply repeats of things that have happened already many times in Japan, but which perhaps are harder to take every time, or perhaps have, like I said, caught me with my wall down because being with the other 5 Aussies has allowed me to open up a little again. Not that I was totally closed before, but it’s a coping mechanism I think, whereby I become rather stoic, and masklike. But you have to, because the very nature of homestay is such that if you don’t, you only make life harder for yourself, and the people around you. I don’t think you can understand just how truly exhausting it is to have to wear a mask 23 hours of the day until you’ve done it. And having said that, I don’t remember feeling I had to at the first host family, so I think it depends on situation. But for example, at my second host family, I found that eyes were on me 99% of the time. At school I obviously had to be cheery and upbeat with the kids, and professional with all the teachers. I knew and expected that, and although it’s hard in Japanese, I was mentally prepared and it was do-able. But I hadn’t been prepared for it at home as well, which I think was why my first week at the second family, on top of being sick, was so hard to deal with. I had to not only deal with the ‘permanent guest’ dilemma, but also guard every single facial expression. Because as soon as you let the smile fall from your face, not even to a frown, but the slightest crease in the brow, they start badgering you with questions and a fuss is made. And trust me, that is very very tiring. I am trying very hard not to sound ungrateful or rude here, but it is difficult when the truth is that I felt intruded on, a lot. I don’t think of myself as a private person normally, I’m fairly open and extroverted, but I guess that’s the difference between being so by choice, yet having one’s own space to retreat to when needed, and being forced to do so without any retreat except beneath the covers.

Anyway, so once I’d adjusted to that, I put up a wall and put on a mask and managed quite well I felt. But then I got to this next family where I have my own space, and went to the college with the other girls and somewhere along the lines, without realising it, I let the wall come down. So then, when I was confronted with a particular situation not once but about 4 times in the past 24 hours, I wasn’t prepared, and it has angered and upset me more than I expected. And again, it isn’t a new experience, but difficult I think because I wasn’t expecting it and was therefore without my safety wall, and also because I have just been feeling more impatient to be home.

I don’t want to sound rude or ungrateful, and I do realise that I choose to feel hurt and frustrated by this. And I contemplated whether to blog about this or not, but I came to the decision that I need to because I don’t think that this is a Japan-specific problem. I think this is a general foreigner-come-to-visit thing, and therefore that everyone should think about it.

The situation is this: I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language perfectly, but quite well enough to express myself when I need to, and I certainly understand almost everything of general conversation. Not if the conversation is about complex topics or specific to a situation that I haven’t experienced, but general everyday stuff, no worries, I understand. But my, my! What a funny thing a language barrier does to some people. Just because one may sound like a 5 year old when one speaks because one has, as yet, only a grasp of fairly simple language, does not mean one has the mental capacity of a 5 year old. Which, by the way, is quite a lot in reality, but people quite often seem to treat children as stupid because they are young and that’s the point I’m getting at here. Just because I’m only 20, and have the verbal expression of a 5 year old, doesn’t mean I don’t understand what you’ve just said about me, or that I’m incapable of doing things for myself. Or of forming opinions of my own, which many of you will know I quite like to do, :P

But here in Japan it goes further than the language barrier issues, which are frustrating enough. It extends to appearance. What I mean is that I’m quite obviously of Caucasian appearance and definitely not Japanese. So people stare. And we get treated as a novelty, as an amusement, almost as an animal in a zoo at times. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny. I have a lot more sympathy for zoo animals now. And for people who are on the receiving end of racism. I wouldn’t call what we are experiencing racism, because it’s not. But it is frustrating to be immediately identifiably different.
I didn’t experience this phenomenon in Italy really because superficially you couldn’t tell I was any different from them. One notable example was when there was a substitute teacher in the class and she asked me a question, not realising that I wasn’t Italian and had no idea what she said. (it was still very early on before I knew much Italian.) So in Italy, until I opened my mouth, I was exactly like any other kid in the class.

But here it is very different. And I wasn’t kidding about the zoo thing. Out of the 6 of us here, at least 3 of us have had experiences where friends or relatives or neighbours of host families come over to ‘look at the Australian girl.’ Just like a zoo. Not to get to know her, not to even talk to her really, just to look at her, like an animal on display. And it’s frustrating, because then they stand there, patting her arms and smiling patronisingly at her, and talking about her as if she weren’t even there. She may as well be a lifesize cardboard cutout, because that is how it feels at times. And it’s not until they’ve discussed every other detail they can think of, that the spectator thinks to ask ‘Does she speak Japanese?’ To which she quickly replies YES before the host family can reply, with a bit of a defiant note in her voice that she hopes will convey that she understood every bloody thing you just said.

Not that what they are saying is in anyway bad, it’s just fact. Spectator asks host family her name, her age, where in Australia she’s from, how long she’s here, why she’s here, what food she likes, etc etc. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Except that she’s standing right there and perfectly capable of answering for herself, but nobody says anything to her. Think about it this way: if she were just some Japanese relative visiting from another city, or if the entire thing was happening in Australia between 3 Aussies, or in any place where all 3 parties spoke the same language perfectly, then it would be incredibly rude to have an entire conversation about the 3rd party while she is standing right there, and not even try to speak TO her or INVOLVE her in conversation or do anything other than treat her like a zoo animal, to be observed and studied and patronisingly smiled at. And the 3rd party, for the sake of politeness and not-causing-a-fuss-ness, just stands there with a fake smile on her face, seething inside at being patronised and studied in such a way, and doesn’t try very hard to MAKE conversation or correct the host family’s incorrect observations that she ‘LOVES plain rice’ (when really she’s just been too polite to say she hates all the bloody fish flavoured stuff you always put on it so she just say she prefers it plain), because frankly, she didn’t want to meet the random person in the first place.

So the moral of the story is: foreigners are people too. And you should treat them as you would treat any other person. Don’t assume that because a person can’t communicate very well in a 2nd (or 3rd! or 4th! Or 5th!) language that they aren’t intelligent or capable of doing things for themselves. And DON’T assume that they don’t understand more than they speak, or more than they let on. (because sometimes they are just so pissed off at being treated like an idiot or so tired/homesick/longing for their own space that they don’t WANT to speak to you, so they pretend that they can’t). So be careful what you say about them in their presence. Particularly just because communication isn’t all about words and a patronising smile or tone of voice is the same in all languages. And don’t pat them or call them cute. That will only further the similarities they feel for zoo animals and they won’t like it.

posted by Ellen of Taranganba @ 6:33 PM