The Dance of the Foreigner

The departure day is over a month away, but I decided to go ahead and get my blog up and running before then, to get used to writing things down often. The one thing I regret about my semester in Nantes was that I didn't write down more of my encounters. Many small details have left me now, unfortunately, and while I still remember quite a bit, I'm also sure there are a few important lessons I'm forgetting.

That won't happen this time though! I will update this blog once a week, I promise. Hopefully, even more often than that.

In preparation for the trip, I've read a couple of books on Japan. Here's an insight from one of them, Japanese Beyond Words, an excerpt from an interview with a former director of the National Foreign Language Center. Dr. Walton explains:

Cultural barriers with Japan pose special difficulties for Americans. This is because Japan is a modern industrial nation so you kind of expect it to be "like us." ... You land in Tokyo and you say, "Hey, this is a modern developed country." There is this feeling that "Sure they are different but they are also like us." I believe that feeling fools many Americans. It leads to the mindset, "So since the place seems so much like where I come from, you know, business is business, surely we can sit down and talk that common language."

The problem that you come up with is that linguistically you want to be as much of a native as you can...but culturally there is a delicate dance that you have to perform. In one scene the dancer behaves like the locals. In other scenes he pulls back and asks am I going too far, am I crossing a boundary...Occasionally the dancer goes too far and confronts an attitude of "Look, you're obviously not one of us; you're trying to pretend to be one of us and the more you pretend the more we find problems with that, the more you make us feel uncomfortable. You're intruding into our identity. You're being presumptuous that you can really be one of us." ...there comes a time in which you say, particularly in some cultures, "Look, I'm never going to be anything but a foreigner here."

I've never been very good at dancing. Anyone who's gone swing dancing with me can attest to that. Of course, it's easy to appreciate the art of it from the side, but actually making your feet do the steps and twirls... Well, it takes some time, to say the least. And luckily I do have that time - 3 months and 20 days' worth of it - to see if I can sort all of that out. I'm an American who will be in Japan to learn the ropes, to observe and learn and try new things, not to become Japanese (which is impossible! I know!). Just a foreigner. Hopefully I'll have enough time to figure out how to be a good one. One that doesn't get lost on the subway every day. Or insult anyone - too badly. It'll be fun. I'll just....listen to the music? I guess? The cultural music?