\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So, how was it?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had the best time of my life,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had the worst time of my life,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and tell them of my loneliness after falling out with my host family.<\/p>\n
I ran through a hundred possibilities, and tried some of them, but then I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see their eyes glaze over. For a three-word question, they wanted a three-word answer.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It was great,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say, and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d quickly move on to tell me about the game they watched on the weekend.<\/p>\n
They were frogs, I thought, taking a Japanese proverb a little more literally than it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meant. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dci no naka no kawazu taikai wo shirazu,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 a frog in a pond doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know the ocean, is the equivalent of the saying \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclike an osterich with its head in the sand.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t conceive of a world beyond the banks and any attempt to educate it is wasted effort.<\/p>\n
I stayed in Australia for seven more years, but I was obsessed by the experience. Conversation would turn to music and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough seats. The stream of memories couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be dammed by the indifference the frogs showed and something would spill over into every conversation. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When I was in Japan\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d took on the same clich\u00c3\u00a9 status as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When I was your age\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been through similar experiences and could talk about exotic places, cultures and what else the world might hold.<\/p>\n
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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in Japan.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an office worker. It was time to try another pond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So, how was it?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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… Continue reading Prologue<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1895,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/1895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}