Returning Home

I’m back in Japan. Home. The flights were fine, I timed my plane sleep well and I feel really great.

It was a little comforting to go from the overweight, overwhite offcoming traffic in Honolulu to the waiting room for my flight to Osaka, which had 200 Japanese and four whites.

Making quick jumps between cultures offers an interesting opportunity for comparison. Something I noticed about my time in America was an unfair expectation of mine that, after spending a year in Japan and getting used to the great things about this country (public transportation, healthy food, a superb trash/recycling system, tiny cars), America would have adopted these sensible practices into its society. But of course that’s ridiculous, things don’t happen so fast - or because I want them to.

Some of the obvious ‘reverse culture shock’ experiences include visits to the grocery store and the righteousness with which many Americans regard their freedom and opinions. What’s more fun are the surprises I experience. One of those was the size of American vehicles. I knew they were big, of course, but after hearing about soaring gas prices, shrinking cars, and families in financial trouble for a year, I thought huge vehicles had magically disappeared. They haven’t. Neither, apparently, has the status one associates him or herself with regarding the car that person owns. I saw a lot of young guys driving monster trucks through cities, sometimes with trophy girlfriends leaning up against them. This attitude is just not present in Japan, where cars are seen as more utilitarian (and thus they’re smaller).

Any expectations I had of change would be slightly skewed by the fact that I spent most of my time in rural places, where I think change is a bit slower to catch on.