Back to Japan...

I guess I've been waiting a long time to be able to write this entry (backdated to the day/time of my arrival in Japan this third time around). I always knew I'd resurrect this blog the next time I came back to Japan, but I didn't know it would take me six years to do so. A brief recap is probably in order. I started studying Japanese in college, after wanting to study it for a long time and picking up random words over the course of adolescence. That desire was thanks to a teenage obsession with anime and manga I'll blame on the bad influences friends who got our whole group into it. This coincided with the discovery that I might have a knack for foreign languages, and after I added French to Spanish in high school it only made sense to add Japanese too once I could since I'd been exposed to it for a while by that point. Thus, I chose a college that had a Japanese program over one that did not, and I forced my way into Japanese 101 after the course had already closed. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I loved learning Japanese almost immediately and had a great time with all my classmates, so much so that I ignored my declared French major to apply to live in the Japanese wing of my school's language house. I was accepted and spent a wonderful sophomore year in the Japanese house, punctuated by a January term to Japan that was my first trip abroad; I was fortunate enough to win a scholarship that paid for it. As part of the course/trip, I stayed with a host family in Chiba (near Tokyo) for one week and spent two more weeks traveling around Japan. Some of my fellow travelers/classmates were not my ideal people to spend 2-3 weeks with, and some parts of the itinerary were not quite aligned with my interests, so it was an uneven trip overall but the impressions of Japan stayed with me. It had been such a different experience from anything I'd ever known, and it was such a trip to be in the place with the language and cultural exports I'd been familiar with for about six years by that point, since a formative time in my youth. I thought it might be a fun one-off adventure, but upon my return I started to almost miss it more and more. Then more and more people I knew from the language house decided to study abroad in Japan the next fall, and our native-Japanese-speaker TA who lived in the house with us announced she was taking a job with the study abroad program everyone was doing, and would be working in their office. Hearing all that, I couldn't resist deciding to join them, which meant disrupting plans of a full year in Paris. It was a fantastic decision; I had the time of my life, made amazing friends, and got to live where I could see my old host family once a month and go into Tokyo anytime I wanted. After that experience, doing exactly what I loved, Paris was truly a disappointment (as nauseatingly entitled as that sounds--obviously, the city itself wasn't, because it's freaking Paris, but the program and people were). But that's another story...

My senior year of college, naturally, I started to think more and more about careers. I wanted to pursue a path that would allow me to use Japanese professionally (becoming a translator), but couldn't see how to make it happen. I'd apply for local Japanese-using jobs, but would always get rejected because I wasn't a native speaker or close enough. Same for the wonderful grad school with a translation program I found--my Japanese wasn't good enough to be accepted to it. So, since my Japanese needed to be better: move to Japan. But--I had just gotten into my first real relationship, and I wasn't willing to cut it short by departing for Japan as soon as I could upon graduation. We agreed that when he graduated, we'd move to Japan and teach English together, and in the meantime I would wait for him and look for jobs in a field that utilized my English degree and publishing internship experience. Four years later... haha. Four years later, I was working as an editor (/writer/proofreader) at a small coffee table book publisher, he had graduated and gone into digital forensics almost immediately, and it looked like I was on my own for this whole Japan thing. So, there were some twists and turns along the way, but finally I was able to do what I knew I'd needed to for years, and make moving to Japan a reality. And now here I am!

Before arriving in Japan, I quit my job at the beginning of the summer and spent the summer doing an intensive Japanese language program: Middlebury. We all had to sign a pledge swearing not to use English all summer, for two months/eight weeks, and we attended four hours of classes every weekday morning. We lived on a college campus in Northern California. I was sorted into the second-highest level there, a class of 10 people with four teachers, and ate meals in the cafeteria every day with other Japanese school students. It was fantastic. It was seriously one of the best experiences of my life. It's that feeling when you're doing EXACTLY what you want and need to be doing, and it feels so right. There were (many) stressful times too, and I had to do things I don't like (and would never have to do as a pro translator) such as writing Japanese and kanji by hand, but overall, it was a fantastic fabulous experience, I was lucky enough to make great friends and have largely amazing classmates, across-the-board awesome teachers, and it was just one of the best times of my life that prepared and primed me perfectly for coming to Japan. I'm convinced that it's one of the best ways to progress your Japanese--even more so that simply living in Japan. I recommend it to anyone, for any language. I miss it so much!

I'm going to live in Japan, teach English, and try to parlay my Japanese abilities (which right now are right on the cusp between intermediate and advanced) into a non-teaching job, and/or try to get a bunch of freelance translating assignments and start to build a portfolio. Eventually I want to go to that grad school with a translation program, but we'll see how everything plays out. I definitely don't plan to live in Japan forever, or indefinitely. It's hard being separated from my boyfriend, friends, family, and pet cat, and teaching isn't a natural fit for me (I'm an introvert), but I get to live in the place where they speak the language I love, and hear it and speak it myself just about every day. I'm going to make the most out of my time here and hope it all works out for the best in the end! I hope you enjoy following along on my adventures.

P.S. I'd also like to note that Audrey, one of my closest friend during my time studying abroad with IES Tokyo who was mentioned often in my fall 2006 posts, was killed on April 21, 2011. She was struck by a turning truck as she rode her bike around downtown Minneapolis. The news came as a complete shock to me and it's absolutely one of the worst tragedies I know. Audrey loved Japanese like I did, had so much promise ahead of her, and we had so much fun together during study abroad. We hadn't been in regular contact when she died, which I'll always regret, but she had been in my thoughts often, and now even more so. Audrey was a wonderful, fun person, and I'm so sad her life was cut short and she's gone.