A Stroll Down Memory Lane in Japan
Happy Memories of Life in Takamatsu
First impressions can be misleading. I wasn’t instantly enamored with Japan when I took up residence there in my late twenties.
And yet I found happiness. I ended up staying for thirty-six years — working full-time, marrying, having three sons, publishing academic research and three crime fiction novels — and only leaving in the spring of 2020, when I’d retired and wanted to spend time in an English-speaking country, at least for a while.
I arrived in Japan in February 1984 to take up a position at a private university in Shikoku. It was sited in a sleepy little fishing village on the northwest coast of the island.
After flying into Osaka from the States, I had to board a tiny propeller plane to get to Shikoku. It was a rough ride. Half an hour into the flight, with the plane buffeted by strong winds gusting over the Seto Inland Sea, I was relieved to find a vomit bag located in the seat back in front of me.
The middle-aged male Japanese passenger sitting beside me seemed not to notice my distress. Excited by his proximity to an actual foreigner, he kept plying me with questions in broken English in the intervals of my bouts of retching.
I’d just spent three and a half years doing postgraduate research in Edinburgh. Although I was acquainted with privation in the form of being a penniless student living in a tiny flat with no central heating and little hot water, I had gloried in the architectural splendors and spacious parks of the Scottish capital.
I blame that fact for my initial disaffection with Japan.
When I learned I’d got the job, I tracked down a simple map of Shikoku — and specifically, Kagawa prefecture — in Edinburgh University’s library. It looked a charming place, dotted with mountains and temples and even the occasional palm tree.
I’d imagined I was fated to be transported to some exotic paradise.
But I was immediately disillusioned on arriving in Takamatsu. The taxi that whirled me from the airport to my university passed down one narrow street after another festooned with a jumble of power lines and crowded with ugly houses and apartment blocks, petrol stations and fast food joints like McDonald’s and KFC.
There were scarcely any trees or greenery at all, and the university proved disappointingly bleak and modern, resembling a building site. It was a far cry from the ancient campus steeped in tradition I’d just left in Scotland.
I’d expected to teach English literature, but it soon became clear most of my students could barely manage even simple English greetings. I found that even among professors specializing in English studies, only one or two could speak it with real fluency.
There was just one other Westerner in town, and he was working so many part-time jobs we could rarely meet. Also, his Japanese wife felt threatened by our friendship. Alas.
I felt isolated but, oddly, safe. The Japanese were too courteous and well-behaved for me to feel threatened in any way. But the loneliness! Whenever I ventured into the neighboring city with its profusion of English language schools and, hence, Westerners, I couldn’t help myself. I’d dash towards any I saw, just to converse, however briefly, in my own language.
I soon learned to love Shikoku’s beautiful scenery of undulating mountains, orange groves, fruit farms, fields of vegetables interspersed with rice paddies, temples and shrines, and shimmering reservoirs and rivers. I came to relish the delicious and healthy and tastefully presented food.
The people were kind, their manners exquisite, and they certainly went out of their way to make me feel welcome. For example, a month after my arrival I traveled to another prefecture and then boarded a bus to return to my university.
It soon became apparent to me that we were traveling in the wrong direction. I stumbled to the front, managed to convey my predicament to the driver, and after consulting with the ten or so other passengers on the bus, he got their consent to turn the bus around and take me to the stop where I could catch the bus I needed.
But it was constantly impressed on me that I was “other”: a stranger in a strange land. Children followed me when I went shopping. Sometimes the mere sight of me inspired a little one to burst into tears.
For all the good will on both sides, there seemed to be an insurmountable barrier between us Westerners and the Japanese. It was partly because of the language barrier. But I knew I could scarcely blame the Japanese for not knowing English when so few of us foreigners could manage anything beyond basic every day Japanese.
As I’ve said, I found contentment. I got a tenured position at another university, one with students more academically minded than those at my first place of employment.
I married a Japanese farmer and we had three sons. I made a life for myself in a country I initially thought would forever be alien.
I had no way of knowing then, in that first year in Japan, that I was inhabiting a world that was in the process of transforming itself.
Now, there are many foreigners in the country, even on Shikoku island, including quite a few who are completely fluent in Japanese.
The tiny airport in Takamatsu where I landed has been supplanted by a large gleaming facility hosting even international flights. The university that initially hired me has expanded and grown, its student body at least five times what was it was when I taught my first classes there.
Even the sleepy little fishing village where I once felt so isolated has changed beyond recognition. It has become a big bustling town full of factories and offices and shopping malls where the sight of a foreigner scarcely merits a second glance.
As the song goes, “You don’t know what you got ‘till it’s gone.” I rather miss the quaint, dusty Japan I encountered all those years ago when my being a foreigner meant I was automatically accorded the status of a star attraction.
I hated it at the time. I was a reluctant celebrity, often longing for Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.
But it conferred benefits. When I mentioned my wish to buy a car to the authorities at my first university, they arranged an appointment for me at the local license center. The dean and his chauffeur and I were ushered to a room of plush sofas and gleaming tables and given tea and cakes. Officials scurried around us, completing all the necessary forms, scrutinizing my Indiana driver’s license and photocopying it, and then, with a polite flourish, issuing me a Japanese one.
Now, of course, I’m one of hundreds when I turn up there to renew my license. I rush to join the long queues to submit documents, pay fees, and have my vision checked and my photo taken. I’m anonymous, ordinary, no longer singled out for special attention.
When I’m back in Japan, I’m still occasionally stared at. I’m asked whether I can use chopsticks or speak Japanese. I’m asked where I’m really from.
A friend, a fellow foreigner, has told me she interprets such questions as microaggressions intended to remind us Westerners we can never be completely accepted, never completely belong in Japan.
I agree, but I feel terribly fortunate that I landed a job in Japan and made a life for myself there.
Having arrived as a rather spoiled American, I know I’ve benefited from the Japanese emphasis on self-discipline and self-restraint, the belief in courage and a stiff upper lip. I’ve also enjoyed trying to acquaint myself with, and to appreciate, the wonderful cultural traditions that form such an essential component of life in that country.
Life in Japan has proved rich and rewarding, if initially, it was a blessing in disguise.
