Living in Japan

This will probably come out of the blue since I haven’t mentioned it at all despite the fact that I’ve been planning it for months now.

I recently moved to Osaka, Japan to teach English, and I’ll be here for at least a year, perhaps even longer. I had a lot reasons to do so: this being the point in my life when I’ll probably be the most untethered to any particular place in the world, a desire to change up my life and try something new, and the fact that I’ve been a high-functioning weeb since I was a teenager.

I’ve been here long enough now that I’ve experienced a lot of the initial culture shock that westerners tend to go through, such as figuring out the labyrinthine transit system, the general cleanliness everywhere, the impressive amount of vending machines. Even still, I’m finding new experiences every now and then which can throw me for a bit of a loop (for example, I tried natto today for the first time. That definitely tested the limits of my culinary adventurousness).

One thing that I’ve been having lots of fun doing is learning Japanese. I came here with essentially zero knowledge of the Japanese language, aside from a couple swear words I picked up from anime. It’s been a real mindfuck learning both Hiragana and Katakana, as well as the syntactical differences between Japanese and English. It’s by far the most dissimilar language to English than I’ve ever tried to learn.

Teaching English has made me see certain aspects of the language in a new light. For instance, just how many synonyms we have. A lot of my Japanese students will ask me what the difference is between two words which have nearly identical meanings, such as “spontaneous” and “impulsive” or “jealousy” and “envy.” It’s forced me to actually consider what really distinguishes those words from one another. 

In more unfortunate news, my writing has taken a bit of a backseat for the past month. I could use the excuse that I’m adjusting to life in Japan, but it’s kind of a bullshit copout. The reality is I still have plenty of time on my hands to do so, but I’ve fallen out of practice. I’m still going to be working on publishing book two of The Archman while I’m here, but I haven’t created any new works or added to any ongoing projects for the past month. Hopefully it’s a rut I’ll get out of soon.