It’s been almost a month since we found out that we will be spending the better part of the next two years in Japan. This isn’t our first time being part-time residents of Japan. Back in 1994 we had the privilege of starting a four year adventure in Japan. We enjoyed daily life in Japan, living there was a very satisfying and enriching experience overall. We have a lot of great memories from our time in Japan and are very excited about going back. This is not to say that we didn’t experience some culture shock during our stay! I have decided to share some of my more vivid memories of those first few days and weeks back in 1994 in a series of posts which I will call “Memories of Japan”. The experiences that I will describe are not that uncommon for foreigners coming to Japan for the first time and they made me realize, and appreciate, all of the things that I took for granted at home. These things take a lot of effort to accomplish when you first get to Japan but the good news is that over time, and with practice, everyday life in Japan becomes easier, more routine, but never dull!

Here is this first installment of “Memories of Japan”:

The Trip & Our Arrival

The trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Tokyo, Japan was the longest trip I have even taken in my life both by the clock and emotionally. In reality it was about 16 hours from the time that we left Phoenix until we landed at Narita Airport. I can’t sleep on planes and have been told that I am over-analytical at the best of times. Given my nature, I spent the whole flight thinking about what I was getting into, all of the challenges that I would face and how I would handle the whole experience. The excitement of living in Japan was temporarily overshadowed by these thoughts.

When we finally landed at Narita and were met by a limousine (which I was excited about but turned out to be a mini-van). We then drove, in the dark, for what seemed to be forever and finally arrived at our mansion (really just a very small Japanese style apartment). We slept well but woke up early, due to the effects of jet lag, and decided to take a walk. As we wandered around our neighborhood we saw some cute little houses with beautifully manicured Japanese gardens and a number of quite industrial looking apartment buildings (ours was one of them). Apart from the little gardens behind the cinder block fences of some of the homes there wasn’t very much green to be seen and it was very quiet except for the sound of cars and the rumbling of the train as it passed. Even the school children played their games quietly!

We came to learn that most of the shopping and eating establishments are usually located near a train station. This meant a 10 minute walk in either direction from our house for us. Now we knew what all those bikes were for! Of course once we got there we felt like we were on another plant. All of the signs were in Japanese and we didn’t have any sense of which store sold what so we spent quite a bit of time wandering down the street looking into store windows trying to figure out what they sold and if we would need it. I wonder what the employees thought. Here were two foreigners staring into their store but too scared to go in.

Do you remember your first day of school? You didn’t know anybody, you didn’t know where everything was and you were intimidated by the prospect of spending a whole day there. Well, that’s how we felt about Japan. Nothing seemed familiar – what did a sign for the grocery store look like, what about the post office, how would we get the groceries home? We couldn’t read or speak Japanese and we had our address written on a piece of paper with no hope of memorizing it. We didn’t know how to live in Japan and we would be there for eight months not just the day!