alien

I always thought calling foreigners “aliens” was a strange practice. But this term has come to have so many implications for my life as a foreigner in Japan. I was told by one of Adam’s Japanese friends that the polite term for foreigners is “gaikokujin,” which simply means someone from a different country. But there is also another term for foreigners, which is “gaijin.” This means someone “who is other,” as explained to me by this friend, and is impolite. But, while it may be impolite, “gaijin” seems to be the more accurate term for who I am in Japan. I am not just someone from a different country, I am “other,” a stranger to Japanese life and culture.

I have an alien registration card that I am required to carry around with me at all times, for instance. This card serves to communicate what I am doing in a country that is not my own, and where I come from. In a sense, it allows me to justify my existence in Japan because, as an alien, I need to justify it.

But being an alien is more than just an official term. It is characteristic of my life in Japan is so many ways, the most obvious being that I look alien, with different facial features, skin tone, and hair. I believe it takes a Japanese person approximately .01 seconds to deem me a foreigner upon looking at me. And then some of them continue to look at me or Adam, or any other foreigner, for about 5 more minutes.

Of course, I have an alien language that no one seems to understand, except for those few English teachers I speak with at work. And even then we are both speaking English but still speaking different languages at times. Coming to Japan has certainly opened my eyes to the complexity of English and any language. Explaining phrases such as “nothing less” (as in “this will determine nothing less than your career path”) are more difficult than I ever expected. Everything seems easy in my head, but I struggle to explain exactly how phrases and sayings work. I just want to say, “nothing less” means, well, nothing less.

I also struggle to understand the English that is spoken to me at times. Many of the people I speak with at work are very easily understood. But once in a while, I try to understand their English and my brain cannot process it because I have heard it one way for all my life. I went bowling last night with my coworkers, and one teacher tried to ask me what my average was. What I heard was just “abooreegee,” and I was completely stumped because I had no general idea of what he was asking, or whether he was asking or telling. I finally figured it out, but I felt awful because here this guy was trying to accommodate me by using English, and I couldn’t even make a leap to get what he was saying.

Being an alien is a two-way street. I feel as though I am alien, but many things feel alien to me. The washing machine is weird. The microwave doesn’t make sense. Why do they separate trash this way? It’s not just people, it’s also things and processes that feel alien. I had a very scary moment when I first came to work and tried to use the computer. Microsoft Word, the Internet browser, and everything else was full of Japanese characters. Even though I have used these programs forever, I suddenly felt completely lost trying to remember where exactly everything was. It sometimes takes me a few minutes through a process of elimination to figure out how to do things like create a text box if I have never done that action in the program on a Japanese computer before.

The surprising thing is, despite all this, I still like living in Japan. Many things that were simple in the States are now frustrating and scary, things like sending traveler’s checks home (took over an hour), getting gas, getting to a place, or getting a memo at work. It gets exhausting, but I think Adam and I have both discovered in our own ways how to be creative and solve problems like we’ve never done before. While there are certainly times when I want to pull my hair out, most of the time I feel lucky to be here and experience all the challenges and joys that have happened and are yet to come.

~Melissa

~ by amfenrick on October 6, 2009.