An Email to Rotary

I sent a little update email to Rotary back home yesterday, and decided to put it up here for everyone.

Hey! Oh right, I forgot that I live somewhere other than here. Haha.

Sooo, I finally moved to my new family, after six months. It seemed
such a long time! I liked my last host family a lot, because I was
able to see a lot of Japan and it was really easy to get to school,
and my host mom was very nice. But this new family is totally
different. It’s different enough so that I can’t really compare the
two. First of all there are two kids, both in elementary school. The
family is very nuclear, reminding me of home a lot. The younger boy
and the elder girl are both really funny, and have bee really nice to
me. I think that it’s because their older sister is in America,
exchanging with me. Her and I actually have been having some online
conversations, which is good, because she gets back before I leave.
The parents have also taken me in. My host mother makes me bento (box
lunch) twice a week, and last night my host dad and I build a plastic
model (it’s a gundam model, in case you wanted know, but I don’t think
you will know what that is… ). I think that the fact that I’ve
really begun to get a grasp on the language helps a lot too.

I live in the middle of town, a 5 minute bike ride to Japanese class,
a 2 minute ride to the ocean, and walking distance to the bus stop.
Moving to a new family is kind of like doing a mini exchange; there
are new culture learning experiences, re-re-evaluating my way of
thinking, and discovering new roles and patterns that define one’s
life. For example I now have a bike I can use freely, whereas in my
last host family I had to rely on my host mother to get somewhere. Now
I have the freedom to go places, and the places to go to too.

One of the backwards things about Japan is the school year. It ended
in March and started on the 4th of April. I got to see a Japanese
graduation ceremony (again, very different from ours, yet it is
practically the same in all of Japan) and even a college entrance
ceremony. And even more, because the teachers are all regulated by the
government, every school changes a few teachers every year. One was
our archery teacher, which was sad because she was one of the coolest
teachers in the school. Starting on the 1st of April in all of Japan
is the new fiscal year too, so actually a lot of people lost and
changed jobs at that time, including the International School’s
Australian Principal and a Korean woman who worked at the town hall,
both of whom I became friends with.

During spring break I went with the other Rotary Exchange Students
(the current ones and the ones going out this year) to Tokyo for an
Orientation. We did a whole bunch of things, including going to the
famous Akihabara, also know as the Electric Town, and Tokyo Disney
Sea. Pretty much Akihabara is where all the anime and technology geeks
gather and where tons of cool stuff is sold. And Disney Sea was
awesome; two hour waits (it being a holiday weekend and all) and a
grand total of 2 rides. I learned some great Japanese bored games as
we waited. I think it was pretty helpful for the Outbounds to be
hanging around the Inbounds a bit because they got to see a little of
what it might be like for them, and also get to ask questions and
stuff so that they are only mostly overloaded when they get to their
destinations.

Then this weekend I went up to a city called Mutsu for a Rotary
Inter-City Meeting, in which I was the only student there, and they
told me 30 minutes beforehand that I was going to introduce myself.
The guy with me helped me by asking me a bunch of questions I should
answer, but alas I forgot most of it, and ended up telling them about
what had shocked me when I first came to Japan: horse meat is not only
eaten here, it is eaten as sashimi, or raw. What shocks me more now
though, is that if presented with horse meat, raw or cooked, I would
probably try it. That being said, I would probably try a lot of things
that you might be baffled to hear about, including whale and a special
Hokkaido dish in which a still-living oyster is cooked and eaten.

There are things here that I have grown to love too. First is rice. I
eat it every day, breakfast and dinner, and sometimes lunch. It is the
staple food of Japan, and it is going to be very odd going home and
not having rice and fish and miso soup every day. They say you gain
weight when you go on an exchange but I think I will when I get home,
back to the meat oriented culture. And then there is the cell phones,
which are way higher quality than the ones back home. Possibly the one
thing I’ll miss the most, though, is the Japanese bath. I think I’ve
already explained it before, but it is truly one of the greatest
things that won’t make it to the Western world.

Well, I should get to sleep soon. Tomorrow I’m taking off school to
help my host mom who volunteers in the fields. I think I’m going to be
pulling up potatoes. So, じゃね！See ya!

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