Prologue

“So, how was it?”

The first twenty times I heard it, I considered the question. Recently returned from a year of living in Japan, I was bursting to tell my friends what it was like to live with a Japanese family, to go to a Japanese school. In my head, I ran through the ensuing conversation, but could never manage to find a starting point.

Should I tell them about the food and the way each person in the family had their own personal bowl, tea mug, and chopsticks? Or perhaps I could open with the school system and that the teachers, not the students, moved between classes. “I had the best time of my life,” might have been a good introduction, leading into a discussion of the summer break I spent with my first girlfriend, Yukiko. But that was only part of the picture. I also wanted to say, “I had the worst time of my life,” and tell them of my loneliness after falling out with my host family.

I ran through a hundred possibilities, and tried some of them, but then I’d see their eyes glaze over. For a three-word question, they wanted a three-word answer.

“It was great,” I’d say, and they’d quickly move on to tell me about the game they watched on the weekend.

They were frogs, I thought, taking a Japanese proverb a little more literally than it’s meant. ‘i no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu,’ a frog in a pond doesn’t know the ocean, is the equivalent of the saying ‘like an osterich with its head in the sand.’ The frog spends most of its life in one pond, never looking outside or wondering what is out there. A frog that lives in a pond can’t conceive of a world beyond the banks and any attempt to educate it is wasted effort.

I stayed in Australia for seven more years, but I was obsessed by the experience. Conversation would turn to music and I’d recall the clamour of the Japanese attempts at rock, and the sight of a school uniform would conjure images of the days I wore a school blazer together with slippers. Every time I went to the movies I remembered standing up in the theatre because there weren’t enough seats. The stream of memories couldn’t be dammed by the indifference the frogs showed and something would spill over into every conversation. “When I was in Japan…” took on the same cliché status as “When I was your age…”

Australia became too confining and I had difficulty relating to most people. Their talk of cars, nightclubs and local problems bored me as much as my talk of unknown places did them. My closest friends, Damion and Jemma, were fellow explorers from the exchange program. They’d been through similar experiences and could talk about exotic places, cultures and what else the world might hold.

When I’d been for a job interview with my company, they asked me where I saw myself in five years, and without hesitation I answered, “in Japan.” With a little pushing on my part, they finally gave me a transfer to the Asian headquarters in Kobe. I packed my dreams and a few Australian CDs and left to experience the life of a Japanese sarariiman – an office worker. It was time to try another pond.