Communication in japan part 1

                A while back I wanted to write a blog post about my interaction with Japanese people after the study program had ended, but before I got around to post it online my thoughts on the matter changed after events at nara.

                Prior to nara, I didn’t really get many opportunities to practice my Japanese, and didn’t need to use it at all if I didn’t want to.  In Tokyo, our roommates were from Canada and Australia, and knew no Japanese and got by just fine.  So I could have been like them, and used only English and survived.  But I feel like they didn’t leave the best impression on people they met by doing that – it might be rude to go to a country and expect them to communicate in your language instead of theirs.  It’s not like the country and everyone in it is just there to serve the tourists. 

So, I used Japanese as much as possible in an effort to fit in and be polite while traveling.  But there wasn’t much that required me to speak at all.  During my time in Tokyo I had used Japanese to talk to policemen/guards twice.  Once was when trying to find that damn movie theater, where we had asked for directions.  And the other time was when I was at a shrine and wanted to know the characters to properly write one of my teacher’s names rather than writing it in a less proper way.  I was able to ask a passing guard to write the character on a paper for me after explaining what we were trying to write.

Beyond that, there was ordering food.  Sit down restaurants and fast food places alike were pretty easy where I would just say the name of the item and ‘please’ in Japanese, or if I didn’t know how to say the name of the item I would just point and say ‘this please’ in Japanese.  There wasn’t much to getting food.

                Also, when walking back from skytree and to Tokyo tower we must have went some back street and stood out because some Japanese person walked up to us and just wanted to start talking. It was as if we were special since on the main street you could find many white people if you wanted to talk to one.  But perhaps it was our apparent age that shocked him, as if we looked like we might know a bit of Japanese to be able to be out here by ourselves?  So we talked to him about how we were international students studying Japanese, and he talked to us about how that was really awesome and that he was glad to hear it, and how we was trying to study Spanish now – he could already speak English, but we spoke mainly in Japanese.  It really made our day to get to talk to just some local guy on the street in Japanese and have it go over well.  He was a very nice guy.  We just talked for a few minutes and then went our separate ways.

                I’ve had more than one encounter like that, especially back in my host family’s city.  But for the most part I hadn’t used Japanese a lot, as there really wasn’t much of a chance to use it.  But my thoughts on the matter changed when going to nara.