Reading Material

I was in Japan for two years, my fiancee for three. In all that time, we amassed a rather impressive amount of Japanese literature. After all, Shonen Jump comes out once a week.

Reading manga was one of the ways I would reinforce my Japanese study. Comics like Shonen Jump were especially useful, as they are made with kids in mind and all the kanji within have furigana (the hiragana appears above it). With around 52 issues a year, we had about 150 by the time we left, and that's before you start adding in all the monthly comics like Shonen GanGan, Zero Sum, and Ward. There were also about a year's worth of Nintendo Dream and Hyper Hobby magazines, the occasional Newtype, Koro Koro Comics, the semi-annual Jump specials (for Golden Week and New Years), a sengoku themed comic that I only found once, and various other odds and ends. We bought bags for most of them and stacked them up in the closet, where they slowly grew to mountainous proportions.

When it came time for us to leave, we had to find something to do with all these books. Normal people, as far as I can tell, keep them for a while then dispose of them, either by putting them out for recycling or selling them to a recycle shop. Fortunately, all we needed to do was call up Emily, who is always enthusiastic about receiving new reading material. She reads comics for much the same reasons as we do and agreed to take all the manga, but not the magazines, which we threw away in chunks at various convenience stores and hotels. Emily's car, as you might recall from the Halloween entry, is tiny. Here's what it looks like when you shove three years of comics into it. First, the backseat:

And the trunk:

I'm glad we were able to fit it all in one trip and that Emily now has more reading material than she will likely ever need. Not that I think it's going to stop her from getting more. It never stopped me.

Coming Home

[Note: the pictures in this post are pictures of my students uploaded elsewhere on the internet, so I feel okay posting them here.]

I returned to the states in August after almost a month of travelling around Amakusa, doing all the things I said I would do one day but never found time for. I’m sure I’ll write about some of it later. For now, I want to talk about what coming home has meant for me and the good and bad I’ve taken from my experience in JET as a whole.

I’ve been thinking about writing about this post for some time, but I never wanted to write it when my emotions about the whole ordeal surrounding my return were still raw. I suppose I thought if I did that, there would be no balance to the post and decided to let some time pass before I wrote anything else here.

When I first came home, I was pretty upset and disillusioned with aspects of Japan and the JET program that I took for granted. Added to that was the self-doubt that the BOE and one of my JTE’s hurtful words instilled in me. I still have days where I feel this way. My time in Japan had also made me forget about who I was in America. By this, I mean that I am not the talkative, outgoing person I attempted to be while there, at least with the kids. For a while after I was back in America, I found it difficult to inject myself into conversations, make eye contact, or listen to people at length. Some of those problems still persist. I also found myself victim to one of the most common aspects of reverse culture shock. When you come back home after so much time abroad, you are bound to get a number of people who will assume that you are happy to be back in America. If I were being completely honest, I’m only happy to be here about half of the time. I loved living in Japan. I loved my job and students. I had a house and a car and had things to do everyday. I have none of those things now, though I’m working on changing that soon. The timing of my return wasn’t what I had had in mind, so I didn’t have a plan in place like I would have liked.

It’s important, though, for me to remember that things weren’t all bad. In fact, as I’ve said several times here and elsewhere, I loved being an ALT. I have far more good memories than bad and I can take heart knowing that I got a chance to play a role in the lives of my students. I sometimes marvel at this idea, the notion that I travelled 7000 miles to a tiny island town in Japan and got to meet such wonderful kids. I look at my pictures often and though it sometimes gets me down thinking about the distance between us, I have to smile at the times we had together. When I left, my JTE (not the same one I mentioned earlier) told me that nothing was changing between the students and me, only the distance. I know I will never forget them and though I will never know for sure, I imagine they think of me too.

My time in JET also gave my career goals some focus. When I was in college, everyone assumed that, as an English major, I would end up teaching. I never really wanted to pursue that before, perhaps because all I could think of at the time was how terrible high school kids were. But teaching in Japan, planning out lessons and implementing them and getting to know the students who actually cared about learning made me realize how much I really enjoy it. I want to continue with ESL training and become a teacher here in the states, though I’ll probably still do my best to avoid high school. Who knows, maybe some day I can get back to Japan.

I keep in touch with a few of my students and teachers via email and Facebook. It’s a good feeling to know I’m still in their lives to some degree. I often wondered what I would do with this blog once my time in Japan was done, but after being back so long, and still feeling this strongly about my time there, I don’t think I’ll do anything. Ariake is a part of me now and it isn’t going to go away. Just like I’m an Aggie for life, Ariake will hold a place in my heart and deserves a place on my blog.

As for the future of this site? Well, I still have a few things I could write about and I’m every bit as passionate about Japanese culture as I ever was. Expect a few more entries on teaching, learning, and living abroad as well as news on the next phase of my continuing adventure.