Compromise and Conceit

Further to my post on role-playing in Japan, I thought I would put up a few links and vague details about my time in Japan. 

My partner had always wanted to live in Japan, and she moved there in August 2005, living in Hiroshima for a year and a half and working for the now-defunct English language  conversation school, Nova, before she moved to Matsue and became a University lecturer. My partner’s blog is here, though perhaps now mostly defunct on account of our having left Japan.

Hiroshima is a wonderful city, and some sense of how cool it is can be obtained from a visit to the get hiroshima website. I strongly recommend that town to anyone who visits.

I spent a year in Australia after my partner moved to Japan, scoring myself a Japan Government Scholarship to study a PhD in statistics. (This scholarship is available for nationals of every country; I got mine in Australia, hence the Australian website). The Japan Government scholarship is worth its weight in gold, because it provides a 4 month full-time Japanese language course before you start studies, and follows this with lots of exposure to Japanese people in the study environment. I had never studied Japanese before so this was a boon for me and my partner. 

I studied Japanese in the small rural town of Tottori, where I made some very good friends, before moving to Matsue to take up my studies. Unfortunately, after a year and a half I gave up on my PhD, for a variety of reasons – mostly to do with being too old to study, being in a backward rural university, and having a few … differences of opinion … with my supervisor, who was (amongst other things) a bully. My adventures in these towns are described on my other blog, which is now mostly in Japanese (but the earlier entries are in English), and some photos are attached here (this is a slideshow).

I left to come to England and work in a damn fine job in London, and my partner followed in August to look for a damn fine job. This means I was in Japan for 2 full years and my partner for 3. I came to London with a whole bunch of misconceptions about how easy readjustment to the West would be, and I think my view of the West has been permanently changed. We both miss Japan horribly and there is at least some chance we will return there for the long term, particularly if we can improve our Japanese. It is a cruel irony of life in Japan, but it is actually really difficult to  study Japanese properly in Japan, and we had hoped to improve our Japanese through formal study after we returned to the West, which is what we are doing now.

About Japan itself I can only say that it is a wonderful place, and everything you have heard about it is, most likely, not true. To me it is a world of forests and mountains and kind, friendly, welcoming people, with an ease of lifestyle that one cannot imagine living in the West (and certainly not in London!) Japanese people are less sexist, less racist, less kooky and less heirarchically inclined than you have been led to believe; Japan itself is cleaner, less polluted, more environmentally friendly and much cheaper than you have heard (and than the West, or at least those parts of the West which I know). Japanese people are very much closer to nature than most people in Australia or England, and Japan has retained its essential uniqueness very well. In many ways Japanese society provides a model for how we should behave and interact in our daily lives. Of course, Japan has many problems, social, economic and political, but it is no more beset by these than we are, and its social cohesion and calm are admirable.

And, of course, Japan is the only remaining Western society which is spiritually pagan on a national and practical level. It is a terrible shame to me that most westerners know it only through the few unpleasant stereotypes the Western media allow to filter through, and I recommend everyone visit it to find out the joys of the place for themselves.