Communication in japan part 2

                In the Tokyo hostel, we were one of the few who spoke Japanese although there were others so we were not that special.  Yet still, the people at the front desk were very friendly and one of the most cheerful girls had conversations with us in Japanese once or twice, like when she had recommended us a place to eat.

                At the nara guesthouse, when I arrived I spoke in Japanese to the best of my ability just as I have done everywhere else – even in situations where a Japanese person says something in English, perhaps assuming we don’t know Japanese, I will respond in Japanese unless the situation doesn’t call for it, just to be nice.  So in the guesthouse, I spoke in Japanese as we were taking care of the check-in procedure and the girl staff member was surprised and happy to find out that we knew Japanese and wanted to let all of the other staff know as well.  They were very happy, and wanted to hear about our backstory about how we were traveling after being international students.  From then on the staff tried to speak in Japanese to us but checked to make sure if we understood some of the more difficult words they used.  They kept saying how good we were at Japanese, even to some of the other people but I tried to be humble and say that I’m not quite good yet, still a beginner and still studying.

                An amazing thing happened the day after that, again in nara.  That day we were off to see the first of the shrines and temples I had planned to see in nara.  Plans changed that day after meeting a man in the local park.  We were walking buy when he said to himself “it’s hot out today isn’t it” in Japanese, and I had responded something like that yes, it was hot out today, but thankfully not as hot as it was in Tokyo where we just came from.  This basically shocked the man as he was like wait, you know Japanese?  He was extremely happy to meet visitors who knew Japanese and got up off the bench and wanted to talk with us while we walked.

  

He eventually decided to give us a tour of the area as we shared stories about our travels and heard about his stories.  He was a retired man, but took it upon himself to study English in his spare time.  He told us that he would watch tv and read in English for practice, and he was pretty good!  He said that he would take walks in the park once a week so we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.  And just like that we made friends with a stranger in japan, and had conversations in Japanese for a few hours.  He eventually walked us to the local shopping mall and gave us free lunch!  Afterwards he had to go since it had been a few hours, but before he went I made sure that we all got a group photo!  I never did learn his name, but we talked about a whole bunch of stuff – even if some of the more in depth explanations of some content in the shrines and temples was impossible for us to understand.  It really made our day, and has been one of the highlights of our trip.  Just to meet and talk to random locals.  Befriend Japanese people, and exchange stories.  It was a really great thing to do and it made us feel really awesome for the day.

We had another awesome experience the next day when we traveled to the location of the original imperial palace.  There weren’t many people there for like I said I thought nara was a lot less populated than it should have been.  Only like 5 visitors in the building at a time, with maybe 5 or 10 volunteers or staffs and guards.  One of the volunteers/staff had come up to us and given us a pamphlet with information about the place in English.  I thanked him in Japanese and said that while I can understand a little Japanese, in a place like a museum it’s very useful for me to have an English explanation.  He must have been surprised that I knew Japanese at all since when he went back to his table he must have talked with the people nearby to tell them about how they had white visitors that spoke Japanese.

 I say that because then later we had a guard come up and start asking us questions in Japanese – the place was interested about us.  So we told him that we were previously students at konan university which he knew of, and then we told him about where we have been and where we are traveling to.  He thanked us for talking to him and then as we looked at some of the rest of the stuff in the palace we could hear him on the other end of the room telling the others about how we were students at konan university, and so on.  They all sounded very excited.  On our way out as we were about to walk off the grounds we saw the guard come out of some building with more papers and pamphlets in Japanese about the place.  He gave us these gifts and said maybe we could use them for studying Japanese.  So basically, we left a great impression on the people there that day for us to have been given gifts and be talked about just for talking Japanese.  And once again that made our day and made us feel awesome.

After these events we started thinking that we had too high expectations on how much Japanese visitors would know.  It was a very disappointing thing but also a very cool thing.  It seems that because almost no tourists know Japanese and all expect the Japanese to know English, that by comparison we had become the coolest people around just by having studied Japanese for only a year or two.  I told david that we have super powers now.  That we can brighten up the day of a Japanese person just by talking, since we are like the only white people around here that know any Japanese.  We often get complimented, and received gifts, a free tour and a free lunch.  Just by knowing a little bit of Japanese I think we are really getting more out of our vacation than a normal tourist would, just by the simple but powerful pleasure of being able to be friendly and talk to locals.

Unfortunately the people in Osaka didn’t seem to be as friendly.  Nothing bad has happened but the people of Osaka don’t seem to care as much or don’t want to talk as much as the people of nara.  But then again, Osaka is a big city and either we aren’t as unique there, or the people aren’t as friendly to tourists.  So, Osaka had little talking involved.

In my next set of posts I’ll talk about Osaka and Kyoto!  Although, I’m posting this from America already.  My trip ended!  But there’s still more to write.