My first few days in Japan, and my first impressions.

The first few days in Japan have been a real shock. I prepared myself for a really different culture and I studied a lot about the culture before going there but my expectations of the culture (which were high) didn’t meet the degree of differentness that is Japan. I’ll first describe some of the some differences. For example, there is meticulous detail in everything… and when I mean everything, I mean everything. My plug to hook in my internet cable has a small little hatch. I walk into my room and I have to put my card into a slot to get the lights to turn on. Everything is just really detailed and there are many things that are done that I think are fairly useless but do have a use.

My first impressions of the Japanese people are that they take everything incredibly serious attitude. That is compared to Americans. One example is that Japanese police are constantly at attention at all times looking in different directions at their post. They all seem like they are actively looking for a criminal that’s on the loose,or maybe that they are keeping guard over something.

One thing I didn’t expect is that all the Japanese I’ve just walked up to and had to talk to for one reason or another spoke in Japanese. Which you might think would be a normal expectation but from what I’ve heard they normally really try to speak in English before speaking in Japanese. I heard many stories of Americans who went to Japan and could effectively practice Japanese because everyone talked to them in English. I haven’t experienced this yet.

The train stations are fairly easy to use but are incredibly complicated. I have a feeling I’ll be asking Japanese questions like is this the right stop for such and such a lot in the near future. Tomorrow I meet my host family which seem really nice from the information I have. They are both beginners in English so the burden of communication will be on. I think this is really good because if they spoke really good English I think I would be tempted to slip back into English too often.

Hopefully I’ll get a cable for my camera soon so that I can charge the camera and take pictures for the blog.