Crossing Cultures: My GPC Experience
Allison Kittinger
Illumination at the Sun's Origin
Before I made the trip to Japan, I was equipped with lots of cultural competence training and an intermediate-level grasp of the language. I had been a part of Japan Culture Club for two years, and had learned many lessons about the specific cultural norms tied to the Japanese language in my Japanese classes. I was prepared for many social and cultural differences. For example: there are no paper towels in Japanese bathrooms, Japanese people shower before bathing, and there is a very culture surrounding giving gifts. Most of all, I was very aware of the fact that Japanese people are considered very polite, but that politeness is equated with distance. I was told that as a foreigner, it would be very difficult to make friends with Japanese people; as in, people who would let you into their inner circles and put you on the same level as them. I was also prepared to not practice Japanese as much as I hoped to; I heard many complaints from other foreigners who had studied abroad that Japanese people would only try to speak English with them.
Though I did my best to consider differences like those above between American and Japanese culture, I never really considered similarities, or that things could be potentially different from what I had learned about Japan thus far. When I finally got to Japan, nobody during my whole stay tried to speak to me in English. The friends I made, restaurant staff and my host family spoke to me in Japanese. In this way my speaking became much more natural, and informed with colloquial terms that can only be learned through immersion. When I was with friends from my program that were at a lower speaking level than me, some of our Japanese friends that could speak English would use it, but when in a restaurant or store, workers that figured out I could speak Japanese often made me into a translator for others in my program. And when I say friends, my Japanese friends were truly friends; the didn't treat me differently, they spoke to me casually, and I got to know them very well. I credit this in part to my language ability as I could communicate well even with those who spoke no English.
Honestly, I feel as though I experienced a sort of reverse culture shock; I expected Japan to be more different from America than it actually turned out to be. It made me realize all over again that there are always exceptions to the norm. It also reinforced for me that no matter how much you prepare and research a place, you can never truly understand it until you go there. I learned that though it is helpful to do research about a country's culture norms and differences, expecting every person from that country to act in the same way based on those norms is unreasonable. Even in a mostly homogeneous country like Japan, I found that homogeneity is a surface-level trait. I believe strongly that everyone who can should travel abroad, because this is a lesson people have to experience for themselves. It is humbling and opens one's eyes to the fact that no matter how far away the place or inscrutable the culture seems, people are people, and people are human.
Similarly, my host family played pranks on me like they did each other, didn't give me the first turn in the bath (as they would someone they are treating like a guest), and my host parents told me to call them mother and father during my stay. My host father even jokingly scolded me for not welcoming him into the house when he came back from work the way one of his children would. I was able to interact with native Japanese people and even befriend them in ways I did not think were possible prior to my study abroad experience, for which I am grateful to this day; it made Japan much less intimidating and completely changed my perception of its culture.
