The semester begins

So, I made it! I’ve been here outside of Tokyo for almost a week now, and everything’s going more than well. Makuhari is precisely how I remember it – hyper clean, hyper polite, and hyper busy— and the same goes for what else I’ve seen of Japan as well. The highlight of my long but manageable flight was the dinner tray set on my table.

Very Japan, very early in the game. The largest turbulence I encountered was the American flight attendant garbling the Japanese announcements. The Japanese members of the crew stood by politely and listened, of course.

Some of my program’s epals met us at the airport to walk us through the process of changing money, shipping luggage, and not passing out from time difference/new country shock. Then we headed to a training center in Makuhari where we would be staying for the next couple of days until it was safe enough to cut us loose into real Japanese society.

When others readily speak your native language, as the Japanese do, it can be difficult to jump in and speak your secondary (or tertiary) language. I know I felt foggy and hesitant for a while about the whole speaking thing in general. Luckily, the epals here from IES’s two partner universities are very, very eager to speak English and meet English-speaking people. So they don’t really care whether I speak any Japanese or not. Instant friends!

Thursday, the long-awaited homestay family reveal took place. Okaa-san (Izumi) and her two girls (Yuzu and Coco-chi) came to pick me up. After listening to the housing director discuss swine flu prevention while the girls with the white face masks on playing in the back, we headed off to Ichikawa City. As it turns out, they’re wonderful. More than wonderful. Here are some pictures for proof.

They, along with their hard-working dad of late hours, live in a normal house in a quiet neighborhood about 20 minutes east of Tokyo by train. They have a pet hamster with a stripe down its back that they keep in a pink plastic bubble in the living room. His name is Purin-chan – Pudding. Basically all I’ve been doing since I came to stay with them is draw pictures of vaguely Disney characters, build stuff out of wooden blocks, and accept the many pink, scented trinkets they bring me every ten minutes or so.*

Besides spending time with my homestay family, I’ve mostly been trying to eat every new Japanese food I find and soak up as much of the language as possible from any source available: ads, menus, overheard conversations, Sunday morning cartoons. You name it, I’m probably scrutinizing it.

My goal is to be able to make at least junior-high level conversation, without all the pimples and giggles, by the end of December. We’ll see how that goes.

Until next Sunday, じゃあまたね！

*(These trinkets include: 1 bandaid, 1 eraser shaped like a milk carton, two holographic buttons with a winking bunny on them, two pieces of stationery, and two letters including pictures of stick-figure-us holding hands, with hair down to our ankles in pigtails.

I’ve been with them three days.)