Rio Lee
Oct 14, 2005, 18:53
A must read written by someone on outpost nine forums, dont know why, I just feel that I need too post this here too for those that want to come to Japan (me included). And sorry if i post it in a wrong place.
Title : So you want to live in Japan? - Japanese Culture and You
So you want to live in Japan? You want to teach English? You want to study abroad? You want to emigrate? You want to make a pilgrimage? There are so many people whose view of Japan and living there is unrealistic or overly optimistic, and so many people who can use a reality check. I hope to provide some realistic information and insight into living in Japan as someone who's done it for a couple years.
Yes, this makes me biased, because clearly I am not you, and my views, beliefs, and notions about Japan have been shaped by my residence and my perceptions before I came.
To help you understand what that bias is, I'll explain first why I'm here.
I have always loved languages. I studied French in elementary school at a bilingual French/English school in the US. I studied Spanish in middle school as well as high school. I have been interested in Japan since the Ninja Turtles and the Karate boom of the 80's, and was egged along through high school with exposure to Japanese games and cartoons, which I had been previously exposed to but didn't realize them as Japanese products.
When I got to college, I floundered around searching for something that would grab my interest, and took a smattering of courses in all subjects, from anthropology, to logic, to higher level math (linear algebra), to Constitutional law and religion. I took Japanese my second year along with some science and more math, to round out the base of politics and science. My second year of college, my Japanese professor changed, and what had been a fun course turned into a boring review of Kanji, and didn't aid me in my goal of conversational ability. I failed and gave up on Japanese. I ended up graduating with a degree in religion and political science.
My first year Japanese professor ended up at Harvard, which was where my house and my job where I was post-graduation. We met up for drinks and dinner now and then, didn't practice conversation that much, but kept in touch because we got along well. I hated my job at the time, working at a tech company doing quality assurance testing for printer software. I bitched to my professor about the job, and she kept suggesting I teach in Japan. Eventually she brought an application for the JET programme, and told me to get it done or else.
I applied, got into the program, quit my job, and left for Kyoto prefecture in August of 2003. I was placed in the same prefecture as Az, and rode down on the shinkansen together from Tokyo, impressed with his Japanese and wondering how the **** I was going to function with my minimal grasp of Japanese.
I could read kana without much of a problem, maybe about 50 kanji with any competence, and knew a smattering of phrases with relatively poor hearing.
I had very little concept of what to expect, as I knew very few Japanese people, and as I was soon to find out, Japanese people living abroad are quite different from Japanese people still living in Japan. Incredibly different.
I think I'm a rather middle-of-the-road participant in the JET program. Many people come because they have a large interest in Japanese language and/or culture. Many others come because they stumbled upon the program and figured that it was a good way to travel around Asia. Most applicants have very little job experience in the 'real world' post-college. I was neither ambivalent towards Japanese culture, nor drooling over the chance to experience it. I had been once during college and enjoyed it, but lost most motivation with the change to a crappy professor.
So in short, my bias is that I applied neither as a Japanese fanatic, nor as a freeloader looking for an easy job with decent money.
As I said, most of the people on JET fall into one of those two categories -- those who think it's an easy job that will allow them to put off real work for a while and do something fun, and those who have this image of Japan as a focus of their studies and interests and want a chance to experience it first hand.
The former group tends to not do so well in Japan. Most of the people I know who had no interest in Japan, and couldn't speak the language, got out of the country quickly. The job they thought was easy turned out to be relatively boring, and the life outside of their job generally included a boatload of alcohol, and a constant feeling of isolation. That is a generalization, but one that is based on observation rather than assumption.
The latter group tends to divide into several different types depending on where their interest in Japan stems from. The anime/manga/whatever fanatics tend to do the worst, realizing quickly that Japan is not a mecca for nerds and geeks, and that most Japanese people have seen far less anime than they have. They start to realize that reading the manga and watching it here isn't much different that doing the same in the US using their computer.
The people who have an interest in a martial art, cultural property, the religion, the cooking, or some other aspect tend to do well or poorly depending on their placement. Some find that their area has the cultural things that interest them, and let the hobby occupy much of their free time, and find that it gives them a focus for their stay. Those who get placed far away from someplace they can actively pursue their interest tend to leave quicker, or find another job and relocate to some or no success.
The most successful group is probably the people who study the language extensively beforehand, and view fluency and improvement in their language/translation skills to be a worthwhile goal to pursue, and actively pursue it. They are the ones who most often go on to adapt to the Japanese lifestyle best, and the ones who tend to turn into long-term residents. An understanding of Japanese is critical in understanding the society, cultural quirks, and other miscellany in this country without going entirely batty.
People like me, who don't quite fit into either group, tend to end up viewing this as just another place to live. It's just another job. It has its good and bad points, just like the job that came before it, and depending on how rewarding our job is we will stay or go as we please. Some of us study more than others, most of us end up with at least communicative Japanese, and I feel like we tend to adjust better than many other people because of our view of Japan through our own eyes without the heavy tint of perception and expectation to warp what we see.
There are, of course, exceptions to all groups. There are the people like me who blow off the job because they realize that it's not as demanding as their previous job, and end up turning towards alcohol or travel to enjoy their time here before taking off as soon as contractually possible. There are those who come by chance to delay entrance into the real world who find the job rewarding, or their experiences rewarding, and stay longer term than they expected to. There are those who are into a certain cultural property, and find out that the way it's done in Japan doesn't live up to their expectations.
So many martial artists complain that the Japanese give out ranks too arbitrarily and easily, making it meaningless and easier than what they were used to.
And some of the language people discover that Japanese isn't going to net them a high-paying job quickly and easily, and that the effort required to get a job with it is quite a bit more than what they expected, as they realize how different their book learning was from the real deal.
The JET motto is 'ESID' (every situation is different), and while there are broad categories to fit people into as I just did, there will always be outliers. I am not a predictive genius of how someone will cope in Japan, but I can suggest the trends that I've seen.
So now comes the advice, now that I've given some background and information on what I've seen. Since people tend to be piss-poor about judging why they came here, and incredibly dishonest with themselves a lot of the time about what they want or expect, I sincerely doubt that the prior descriptions will be enough to figure out what type of experience you're likely to have. Here is a list of questions I think you should ask yourself before coming, and answer honestly, as well as explanations about why they're important...
What do you want to come of your stay here?
The concept of living abroad and gaining experience with it is a wonderful one which I wholly support. And I believe that everyone who has the opportunity should try to live abroad at least once in their life to see what it's like and to experience being an outsider. It will develop skills quickly that most people will never learn.
However, why Japan? Why here? There are so many countries in the world where you can visit and enjoy. Japan is one that is VERY hard for people from the West to live in, because of the difficult language, the wholly different culture, and the difficulty of fitting in and adapting. While people may talk **** about the French, it is possible to be accepted into French culture and not stick out like a sore thumb after living there for a while. Chances are that you will not be able to manage the same feat in Japan on appearance alone.
So why Japan? As yourself why you want to come here rather than somewhere else in the world. And be honest with yourself, because we're moving on to the next question...
If your image of Japan turns out to be false, how disappointing will it be?
As I said, I support people travelling abroad to learn about a different culture. However, if your entire stay hinges on the perception of the country you have, and whether or not the reality lives up to that image, you are less interested in experiencing the culture, rather than exploring something you think you already know. And whereas that can be fun, it can also explode in your face when the reality doesn't compare to the image you had.
There are many a miserable person who gets to Japan and thinks it's the land of easy women, awesome gadgets, forward thinking efficiency, and then sees the reality not matching up, and finding that everything they were looking forward to receiving without effort isn't going to happen.
For instance, I came to Japan with my contact with Japanese people being solely immigrants to the US from Japan. I spoke to these intelligent open-minded individuals who I obviously liked the company of enough to spend time around. I expected Japan to have a good portion of individuals like this, so that I could have similar friends around me in Japan as the Japanese I knew in the States. My enjoyment of Japan wasn't dependent on that fact, but I figured that it would be a nice bonus.
I was entirely wrong. The intelligent, the motivated, the driven, the tolerant, the exceptional -- those are the people I met in the US. And the average, well, the average is the same everywhere. It took me a long time to meet people here that I was expecting to be quite prevalent. It didn't crush me, but it did change my perception of my first several months when I had few Japanese acquaintances that I could count on as anything more than drinking buddies...
Can you swallow your pride?
This has got to be one of the most important questions for anyone living in Japan. Japanese culture is focused around preserving the 和【わ】 (wa, social harmony), and that means that sometimes you have to swallow your pride and apologize when you did no wrong, or hold your tongue when someone says something stupid, or tone down your argument against a wrong to prevent a friendly meeting from turning into something a little more hostile or uncomfortable.
And it's a hard lesson to learn.
I am a bull-headed piece of **** ******* a lot of the time, and I know it. It's REALLY hard for me to concede that I'm wrong when I can see it as clearly as day. It's REALLY hard to look into somebody taunting me, and lording their correctness over me, and conceding. So when I have to do the same to somebody who isn't even right, it's a real ******* struggle. Swallowing my pride, bowing my head, apologizing for an inconvenience that is not my personal fault is humiliating -- but necessary.
In Japan, so much depends on your social relations and social network. No matter how great your job is, the **** that surrounds your job will occupy a large portion of your time, and most of your time is outside the classroom. There have been so many people who have left due to problems with their supervisor, with their schools, with the expectations of the people above them, and because of their inability to swallow their pride. The people who are the most timid tend to be given a LOT more slack, because they are going to assimilate to the system a lot quicker, or at least not fly in the face of the system.
You have to be able to swallow your pride. If you honestly can't do that, then you are going to run into a brick wall in Japan going full-speed, and it's going to hurt.
How tolerant are you?
This ties in with swallowing your pride in some senses, but in a different way. Japan is an entirely different culture. Entirely different. There are going to be things that you cannot change. You are going to want to change them. You are going to want to take your view of the world and try to shape Japan to it, but Japan is not going to budge if even every foreigner in Japan took that view (and there's not even a chance of that happening anyway).
So you're going to have to be tolerant of people who don't think like you. You're going to have to be tolerant of viewpoints that you disagree with. You're going to have to be tolerant of **** that's said to you without malice but that hurts. You're going to have to grow a thick skin and learn to turn the other cheek. And it's going to suck sometimes. Which is another reason you need tolerance.
You cannot explain so much of this to Japanese people. They are just not going to understand. They are going to take your passionate cries against the system and view them as an affront to them, their identity, and their country. They may be internationalized, have lived abroad, and have experienced some discrimination of their own, but they are still going to have trouble relating to what you're saying. They're still going to shut their ears when you start to rant.
And that's what the foreign community is so good for. That's what foreign friends do best -- let you ***** about a shared experience.
But the foreign community is small. Very small. And unlike home where you can pick and choose your mates based on personality, especially in the middle of nowhere in Japan, proximity more than anything will dominate choices of people you will be around a lot. Tolerance of people you may not even give the time of day to in your home country is of critical importance, because you don't want to drive away your support group.
Sometimes you just need another foreigner to talk to.
What's your goal?
What do you want to do with your time in Japan? The more specific you can be, the more you can pursue an interest, a hobby, or a further career path or study, the more content you will be. Idle time tends to be in abundance when you come to Japan, especially at the beginning. You will find that the flurry of activity when you first come here dies down, and you will be sitting in your apartment wondering what the **** you just got yourself into.
Finding a hobby -- no matter how inane -- is going to help a bunch. Alcohol tends to be the replacement for a hobby, and causes serious serious problems with many many people here (myself probably included). Without somewhere to direct your energy, you will turn to not-so-healthy behaviour. So find a gym, find a sport, find a hobby, find a group, and get out and DO SOMETHING with your time here.
Study, take correspondence courses, work on becoming a world-class cyclist, get in shape, learn a traditional Japanese art, ANYTHING, but have a goal.
All of the advice given in response to the previous questions culminates in one last question which is of utter and complete importance. If the answer to the following question is no, then you should never ever ever come to Japan for more than a trip, because if you get unlucky...
Can you ask for help when you need it?
No man is an island, standing independently. You will suffer culture shock when you get here. If you have proclivity towards depression or mental illness, you may see it flare up. Every year on the JET program, at least one participant seems to commit suicide. There are safety nets. There are solutions. There are ways out. But sometimes everything just catches up with you, and you think you can handle it but couldn't.
You need to have the balls to say, "I can't do this alone, I need help" and go to counselling, or go home, or do something hard like cancelling your contract and going home early.
Yes, this can be true anywhere you live, but Japan truly is a harsh mistress for many people. The stress of living in a different country, a different culture, constantly being stared at, being talked about in front of your face without understanding, being pissed on at work, feeling incapable at your job, the short winter days, the lack of sun, the lack of people around you that you trust, the distance from home, the loneliness, the feeling of being stuck -- most of us feel many of these, not necessarily that strongly, or all at once, but they are different for every person, and some can't handle it.
Everything is just so different here that a swing of highs and lows makes you feel like a manic depressive without their lithium much of the time. You have a wonderful day where you feel like the best damned foreigner who ever set foot in Japan, when you managed to succeed at a hard task through effort and determination, and days where everything is falling apart and you can't find anyone around you to keep you from falling to your knees and sobbing.
And that is going to weigh on you. And it can continue. For days. For weeks. And some people let that get to them. They believe they don't need help. And then they believe there's no one who can help. And then they kill themselves.
So you need to be willing to ask for help. You need to be able to suck up your pride and say, "I can't handle this." You need to be able to make tough decisions on your own, or ask for the help of someone who can help you make them. You need to be able to realize when you're at wits end and get out of a bad situation. And that means you need to realize that you may have to ask for help. Don't bullshit yourself on this point. One out of 5,000 a year is a lot bigger chance than winning the lottery. It can happen to you. Don't **** with your life because you have this view of visiting Japan as a life's ambition which is all that matters.
Realize that help is there if you need it and have the ability to ask.
I think Japan is a wonderful country, and I have been living here for over two years because I enjoy it. But it also isn't all roses and amusing anecdotes about cultural mishaps. It takes a huge strain on your mind and on your body if you're not careful, and sometimes even if you are careful. It can be a wonderful experience, but it isn't perfect, and it probably won't meet your perceptions/expectations of it. I can't tell you what living in Japan is like, because I'm still learning more every day. I just want to offer guidance to people who may not look before they leap. The ground is not solid and paved with gold off that edge, and expecting it to be will only cause you get hurt worse.
Don't let me discourage you from coming or let me colour your perception of Japan as a place that drives even the most stable men mad. Please, take some words of advice and ask yourself those hard questions before you make such a huge decision. And take a day at a time. Because life is too short to waste being dishonest to yourself and miserable.
Good luck.
http://www.outpostnine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1396 <- original text.
I find that the post is a good reference and provide some answers to stuff that I've been wondering about all this times. So what are your opinion on the post?
Title : So you want to live in Japan? - Japanese Culture and You
So you want to live in Japan? You want to teach English? You want to study abroad? You want to emigrate? You want to make a pilgrimage? There are so many people whose view of Japan and living there is unrealistic or overly optimistic, and so many people who can use a reality check. I hope to provide some realistic information and insight into living in Japan as someone who's done it for a couple years.
Yes, this makes me biased, because clearly I am not you, and my views, beliefs, and notions about Japan have been shaped by my residence and my perceptions before I came.
To help you understand what that bias is, I'll explain first why I'm here.
I have always loved languages. I studied French in elementary school at a bilingual French/English school in the US. I studied Spanish in middle school as well as high school. I have been interested in Japan since the Ninja Turtles and the Karate boom of the 80's, and was egged along through high school with exposure to Japanese games and cartoons, which I had been previously exposed to but didn't realize them as Japanese products.
When I got to college, I floundered around searching for something that would grab my interest, and took a smattering of courses in all subjects, from anthropology, to logic, to higher level math (linear algebra), to Constitutional law and religion. I took Japanese my second year along with some science and more math, to round out the base of politics and science. My second year of college, my Japanese professor changed, and what had been a fun course turned into a boring review of Kanji, and didn't aid me in my goal of conversational ability. I failed and gave up on Japanese. I ended up graduating with a degree in religion and political science.
My first year Japanese professor ended up at Harvard, which was where my house and my job where I was post-graduation. We met up for drinks and dinner now and then, didn't practice conversation that much, but kept in touch because we got along well. I hated my job at the time, working at a tech company doing quality assurance testing for printer software. I bitched to my professor about the job, and she kept suggesting I teach in Japan. Eventually she brought an application for the JET programme, and told me to get it done or else.
I applied, got into the program, quit my job, and left for Kyoto prefecture in August of 2003. I was placed in the same prefecture as Az, and rode down on the shinkansen together from Tokyo, impressed with his Japanese and wondering how the **** I was going to function with my minimal grasp of Japanese.
I could read kana without much of a problem, maybe about 50 kanji with any competence, and knew a smattering of phrases with relatively poor hearing.
I had very little concept of what to expect, as I knew very few Japanese people, and as I was soon to find out, Japanese people living abroad are quite different from Japanese people still living in Japan. Incredibly different.
I think I'm a rather middle-of-the-road participant in the JET program. Many people come because they have a large interest in Japanese language and/or culture. Many others come because they stumbled upon the program and figured that it was a good way to travel around Asia. Most applicants have very little job experience in the 'real world' post-college. I was neither ambivalent towards Japanese culture, nor drooling over the chance to experience it. I had been once during college and enjoyed it, but lost most motivation with the change to a crappy professor.
So in short, my bias is that I applied neither as a Japanese fanatic, nor as a freeloader looking for an easy job with decent money.
As I said, most of the people on JET fall into one of those two categories -- those who think it's an easy job that will allow them to put off real work for a while and do something fun, and those who have this image of Japan as a focus of their studies and interests and want a chance to experience it first hand.
The former group tends to not do so well in Japan. Most of the people I know who had no interest in Japan, and couldn't speak the language, got out of the country quickly. The job they thought was easy turned out to be relatively boring, and the life outside of their job generally included a boatload of alcohol, and a constant feeling of isolation. That is a generalization, but one that is based on observation rather than assumption.
The latter group tends to divide into several different types depending on where their interest in Japan stems from. The anime/manga/whatever fanatics tend to do the worst, realizing quickly that Japan is not a mecca for nerds and geeks, and that most Japanese people have seen far less anime than they have. They start to realize that reading the manga and watching it here isn't much different that doing the same in the US using their computer.
The people who have an interest in a martial art, cultural property, the religion, the cooking, or some other aspect tend to do well or poorly depending on their placement. Some find that their area has the cultural things that interest them, and let the hobby occupy much of their free time, and find that it gives them a focus for their stay. Those who get placed far away from someplace they can actively pursue their interest tend to leave quicker, or find another job and relocate to some or no success.
The most successful group is probably the people who study the language extensively beforehand, and view fluency and improvement in their language/translation skills to be a worthwhile goal to pursue, and actively pursue it. They are the ones who most often go on to adapt to the Japanese lifestyle best, and the ones who tend to turn into long-term residents. An understanding of Japanese is critical in understanding the society, cultural quirks, and other miscellany in this country without going entirely batty.
People like me, who don't quite fit into either group, tend to end up viewing this as just another place to live. It's just another job. It has its good and bad points, just like the job that came before it, and depending on how rewarding our job is we will stay or go as we please. Some of us study more than others, most of us end up with at least communicative Japanese, and I feel like we tend to adjust better than many other people because of our view of Japan through our own eyes without the heavy tint of perception and expectation to warp what we see.
There are, of course, exceptions to all groups. There are the people like me who blow off the job because they realize that it's not as demanding as their previous job, and end up turning towards alcohol or travel to enjoy their time here before taking off as soon as contractually possible. There are those who come by chance to delay entrance into the real world who find the job rewarding, or their experiences rewarding, and stay longer term than they expected to. There are those who are into a certain cultural property, and find out that the way it's done in Japan doesn't live up to their expectations.
So many martial artists complain that the Japanese give out ranks too arbitrarily and easily, making it meaningless and easier than what they were used to.
And some of the language people discover that Japanese isn't going to net them a high-paying job quickly and easily, and that the effort required to get a job with it is quite a bit more than what they expected, as they realize how different their book learning was from the real deal.
The JET motto is 'ESID' (every situation is different), and while there are broad categories to fit people into as I just did, there will always be outliers. I am not a predictive genius of how someone will cope in Japan, but I can suggest the trends that I've seen.
So now comes the advice, now that I've given some background and information on what I've seen. Since people tend to be piss-poor about judging why they came here, and incredibly dishonest with themselves a lot of the time about what they want or expect, I sincerely doubt that the prior descriptions will be enough to figure out what type of experience you're likely to have. Here is a list of questions I think you should ask yourself before coming, and answer honestly, as well as explanations about why they're important...
What do you want to come of your stay here?
The concept of living abroad and gaining experience with it is a wonderful one which I wholly support. And I believe that everyone who has the opportunity should try to live abroad at least once in their life to see what it's like and to experience being an outsider. It will develop skills quickly that most people will never learn.
However, why Japan? Why here? There are so many countries in the world where you can visit and enjoy. Japan is one that is VERY hard for people from the West to live in, because of the difficult language, the wholly different culture, and the difficulty of fitting in and adapting. While people may talk **** about the French, it is possible to be accepted into French culture and not stick out like a sore thumb after living there for a while. Chances are that you will not be able to manage the same feat in Japan on appearance alone.
So why Japan? As yourself why you want to come here rather than somewhere else in the world. And be honest with yourself, because we're moving on to the next question...
If your image of Japan turns out to be false, how disappointing will it be?
As I said, I support people travelling abroad to learn about a different culture. However, if your entire stay hinges on the perception of the country you have, and whether or not the reality lives up to that image, you are less interested in experiencing the culture, rather than exploring something you think you already know. And whereas that can be fun, it can also explode in your face when the reality doesn't compare to the image you had.
There are many a miserable person who gets to Japan and thinks it's the land of easy women, awesome gadgets, forward thinking efficiency, and then sees the reality not matching up, and finding that everything they were looking forward to receiving without effort isn't going to happen.
For instance, I came to Japan with my contact with Japanese people being solely immigrants to the US from Japan. I spoke to these intelligent open-minded individuals who I obviously liked the company of enough to spend time around. I expected Japan to have a good portion of individuals like this, so that I could have similar friends around me in Japan as the Japanese I knew in the States. My enjoyment of Japan wasn't dependent on that fact, but I figured that it would be a nice bonus.
I was entirely wrong. The intelligent, the motivated, the driven, the tolerant, the exceptional -- those are the people I met in the US. And the average, well, the average is the same everywhere. It took me a long time to meet people here that I was expecting to be quite prevalent. It didn't crush me, but it did change my perception of my first several months when I had few Japanese acquaintances that I could count on as anything more than drinking buddies...
Can you swallow your pride?
This has got to be one of the most important questions for anyone living in Japan. Japanese culture is focused around preserving the 和【わ】 (wa, social harmony), and that means that sometimes you have to swallow your pride and apologize when you did no wrong, or hold your tongue when someone says something stupid, or tone down your argument against a wrong to prevent a friendly meeting from turning into something a little more hostile or uncomfortable.
And it's a hard lesson to learn.
I am a bull-headed piece of **** ******* a lot of the time, and I know it. It's REALLY hard for me to concede that I'm wrong when I can see it as clearly as day. It's REALLY hard to look into somebody taunting me, and lording their correctness over me, and conceding. So when I have to do the same to somebody who isn't even right, it's a real ******* struggle. Swallowing my pride, bowing my head, apologizing for an inconvenience that is not my personal fault is humiliating -- but necessary.
In Japan, so much depends on your social relations and social network. No matter how great your job is, the **** that surrounds your job will occupy a large portion of your time, and most of your time is outside the classroom. There have been so many people who have left due to problems with their supervisor, with their schools, with the expectations of the people above them, and because of their inability to swallow their pride. The people who are the most timid tend to be given a LOT more slack, because they are going to assimilate to the system a lot quicker, or at least not fly in the face of the system.
You have to be able to swallow your pride. If you honestly can't do that, then you are going to run into a brick wall in Japan going full-speed, and it's going to hurt.
How tolerant are you?
This ties in with swallowing your pride in some senses, but in a different way. Japan is an entirely different culture. Entirely different. There are going to be things that you cannot change. You are going to want to change them. You are going to want to take your view of the world and try to shape Japan to it, but Japan is not going to budge if even every foreigner in Japan took that view (and there's not even a chance of that happening anyway).
So you're going to have to be tolerant of people who don't think like you. You're going to have to be tolerant of viewpoints that you disagree with. You're going to have to be tolerant of **** that's said to you without malice but that hurts. You're going to have to grow a thick skin and learn to turn the other cheek. And it's going to suck sometimes. Which is another reason you need tolerance.
You cannot explain so much of this to Japanese people. They are just not going to understand. They are going to take your passionate cries against the system and view them as an affront to them, their identity, and their country. They may be internationalized, have lived abroad, and have experienced some discrimination of their own, but they are still going to have trouble relating to what you're saying. They're still going to shut their ears when you start to rant.
And that's what the foreign community is so good for. That's what foreign friends do best -- let you ***** about a shared experience.
But the foreign community is small. Very small. And unlike home where you can pick and choose your mates based on personality, especially in the middle of nowhere in Japan, proximity more than anything will dominate choices of people you will be around a lot. Tolerance of people you may not even give the time of day to in your home country is of critical importance, because you don't want to drive away your support group.
Sometimes you just need another foreigner to talk to.
What's your goal?
What do you want to do with your time in Japan? The more specific you can be, the more you can pursue an interest, a hobby, or a further career path or study, the more content you will be. Idle time tends to be in abundance when you come to Japan, especially at the beginning. You will find that the flurry of activity when you first come here dies down, and you will be sitting in your apartment wondering what the **** you just got yourself into.
Finding a hobby -- no matter how inane -- is going to help a bunch. Alcohol tends to be the replacement for a hobby, and causes serious serious problems with many many people here (myself probably included). Without somewhere to direct your energy, you will turn to not-so-healthy behaviour. So find a gym, find a sport, find a hobby, find a group, and get out and DO SOMETHING with your time here.
Study, take correspondence courses, work on becoming a world-class cyclist, get in shape, learn a traditional Japanese art, ANYTHING, but have a goal.
All of the advice given in response to the previous questions culminates in one last question which is of utter and complete importance. If the answer to the following question is no, then you should never ever ever come to Japan for more than a trip, because if you get unlucky...
Can you ask for help when you need it?
No man is an island, standing independently. You will suffer culture shock when you get here. If you have proclivity towards depression or mental illness, you may see it flare up. Every year on the JET program, at least one participant seems to commit suicide. There are safety nets. There are solutions. There are ways out. But sometimes everything just catches up with you, and you think you can handle it but couldn't.
You need to have the balls to say, "I can't do this alone, I need help" and go to counselling, or go home, or do something hard like cancelling your contract and going home early.
Yes, this can be true anywhere you live, but Japan truly is a harsh mistress for many people. The stress of living in a different country, a different culture, constantly being stared at, being talked about in front of your face without understanding, being pissed on at work, feeling incapable at your job, the short winter days, the lack of sun, the lack of people around you that you trust, the distance from home, the loneliness, the feeling of being stuck -- most of us feel many of these, not necessarily that strongly, or all at once, but they are different for every person, and some can't handle it.
Everything is just so different here that a swing of highs and lows makes you feel like a manic depressive without their lithium much of the time. You have a wonderful day where you feel like the best damned foreigner who ever set foot in Japan, when you managed to succeed at a hard task through effort and determination, and days where everything is falling apart and you can't find anyone around you to keep you from falling to your knees and sobbing.
And that is going to weigh on you. And it can continue. For days. For weeks. And some people let that get to them. They believe they don't need help. And then they believe there's no one who can help. And then they kill themselves.
So you need to be willing to ask for help. You need to be able to suck up your pride and say, "I can't handle this." You need to be able to make tough decisions on your own, or ask for the help of someone who can help you make them. You need to be able to realize when you're at wits end and get out of a bad situation. And that means you need to realize that you may have to ask for help. Don't bullshit yourself on this point. One out of 5,000 a year is a lot bigger chance than winning the lottery. It can happen to you. Don't **** with your life because you have this view of visiting Japan as a life's ambition which is all that matters.
Realize that help is there if you need it and have the ability to ask.
I think Japan is a wonderful country, and I have been living here for over two years because I enjoy it. But it also isn't all roses and amusing anecdotes about cultural mishaps. It takes a huge strain on your mind and on your body if you're not careful, and sometimes even if you are careful. It can be a wonderful experience, but it isn't perfect, and it probably won't meet your perceptions/expectations of it. I can't tell you what living in Japan is like, because I'm still learning more every day. I just want to offer guidance to people who may not look before they leap. The ground is not solid and paved with gold off that edge, and expecting it to be will only cause you get hurt worse.
Don't let me discourage you from coming or let me colour your perception of Japan as a place that drives even the most stable men mad. Please, take some words of advice and ask yourself those hard questions before you make such a huge decision. And take a day at a time. Because life is too short to waste being dishonest to yourself and miserable.
Good luck.
http://www.outpostnine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1396 <- original text.
I find that the post is a good reference and provide some answers to stuff that I've been wondering about all this times. So what are your opinion on the post?