And now for the representative from Japan…

On my wall, I have a “Art of Zen Flowers” calendar on which I have been counting down the months and days to my imminent departure to Tokyo. In May, school ended, and the calendar page was turned to a bouquet of countless lilies. June, a pot full of some kind of snapdragons, all warm tones and soft light. And then July was was three flowers suspended in water, nice enough really, but a little sparse. When I flipped to August, I found a lone orchid against a gray background, alone and fragile in its odd environment. Meditating on the monthly transition, I came to a firm conclusion: my calendar was conspiring against me. In its pictures, it attempted to feed my anxieties about traveling abroad in a gradual showcase of lonely little Asian inspired flowers.

And now, T-minus 3 weeks, 2 days, 10 hours and 8 minutes away from stepping on a Delta flight bound for Narita Airport, I wonder if I can truly express all of my goals and expectations, as well as introduce my self to this little online community adequately in this pre-departure post. I suppose if you’ve made it to this paragraph and persevered through my paranoid delusions about malevolent calendars, then you’re a kind enough reader to take me and my blog posts with a grain of salt.

I think the best way to approach all of this is to do it shortly and (hopefully) sweetly, summarizing my goals and fears in list form. Let’s start with the positives, shall we?

Goals for my year in Japan

-Get to the point I can watch a Kurosawa movie without subtitles. Words can’t express how much I long to be able to grunt and growl like all the samurai of those black and white films. Of course, I doubt that Keio (my host university) will deem feudal era Japanese a requirement to fluency of the modern language but still, a girl can dream can’t she? Until then, I guess I’ll resign myself to my next goal.

-The ability to translate pop songs. Oh, go ahead and scoff, but the Japanese pop artists aren’t your average Britney or Justin. Where you may expect to find songs riddled with “yeahs” and “oh girls,” you find trim, expensively dressed boy bands singing about the changing seasons, climbing windy paths, and attempting to overcome being engrossed in trivial matters (See: any and every Arashi song). And you thought karaoke was easy.

-Be mistaken for a Hollywood star/actress. I yearn for the day I’m buying some oddly named sports drink from a vending machine on a train platform and am asked for my autograph. It happens to almost every exchange student, heck, almost every tourist, and will never cease to be an ego booster. Let’s just forget that there seems to be a total stereotyping of these mistakes: every gray-haired man is Richard Gear, every busty brunette Angelina Jolie, and every African-American either a rapper or an A-1 wrestler.

-Become famous through participating in quiz shows. Japan is full of so called “talent” stars, which do nothing but show up on variety shows for no other reason than they eat a lot or have some odd persona which humps anyone and anything (See: Girl Sune or Hard Gay). Think Paris Hilton, but with a lot of corny one-liners and maybe a stage partner who farts on command. It’s so easy to become C-rate talent that I feel I have to have a go.

Fears for the year

-The Japanese metro. I won’t lie; I’ve had nightmares about this monster of modern engineering, like getting lost on the express train and ending up in Mongolia. Imagine if you played connect-the-dots after you’ve have your wisdom teeth taken out, then handed it to a random toddler and let them go at it with the crayons. I think this is a suitable metaphor for the design of the Tokyo subway system. Not to mention that unlike the American metro, which is run mainly by the local governments, all the lines in Japan are owned privately, meaning that I can’t just hop from one to another easily. It would be like ordering a Big Mac at Burger King, if you’d excuse the fast food reference. I need separate tickets and passes for each of the lines. Eek. I forsee a lot of early mornings at the train station.

-All the paperwork. The Japanese are much more organized than the US in terms of keeping track of their citizens, to the point that every flight that originates or arrives in Japan has a detailed passenger list which is televised nightly. On a positive note, you can keep track of employees who said they were going to a family funeral but really are vacationing in Hawaii; on the negative note, it can all be a little “Big Brother.” For a foreign exchange student like me, I’m required to carry on my person at all times my visa, passport, foreigner identification card, student ID and certificate of eligibility from both the metropolitan government and my school. While I understand this is all necessary, I think my blond hair and blue eyes are more than enough to identify me as someone who isn’t local. Not to mention that I dread getting off the plane, wrestling the aforementioned metro and trying to get to the government office to receive all of those IDs all within one day of arrival. Maybe it’s all just a big hidden camera show about jet-lagged foreigners filing out tiny squares of information on page at a time.

There you have it. Goals and fears, made as concrete as possible. You can probably guess that among those are general hopes of making new friends, growing as a person, and experiencing life in a different culture, but I really don’t want to put you through detailed explanations of all of those, not after the whole calendar, “am I the orchid” spiel. I have high hopes, but am fully aware of most of the drawbacks of being a blond girl living in a famously xenophobic culture. In the coming weeks, I’m going pack up my life into fewer suitcases than ever before and flip the page on the calendar. Maybe it’ll be a bouquet, maybe a shriveled leaf, you never know with these zen flower pictures. Whatever it is, I supposed I’ll deal with it and hop that plane anyway. I really don’t have the heart to peek at the September page ahead of time.

Lastly, I’ve decided, since I am the lone student going abroad to Japan, I will attempt to end every post with a haiku that attempts to sum up my general mood. Look out, great cultural traditions of Japan – I’m coming.

See the lone orchid
Shudder at airplane sushi
That can’t be tuna