My first Asian adventure

Kumamoto Castle

 Living in Japan

My first teaching and learning venture in Asia was in Japan in 1990. I went to Japan primarily to learn Japanese because I thought I would get an exciting job when I returned to Australia. Unfortunately, my Japan skills only reached the level of being able to teach Japanese once I returned home!

I first lived in Kumamoto in Kyushu. It was such a huge culture shock.  I lived in a semi-rural area and I was quite a novelty. I used to ride a bicycle to school through the rice paddies and I thought I was Shirley Valentine living a kind of dream.

I went to Japan unable to speak, read or write one word of Japanese, which was a really good incentive to learn the language quickly. I truly believe necessity is the biggest incentive for learning a language. I lived with a Japanese family so had to learn quickly to express my basic thoughts and needs. I studied Japanese full-time and worked part-time and was really busy. I taught very young children, teenagers and adults so experienced teaching every age of student there!

Mount Aso

Catching buses was a challenge. My home-stay mother would write the Chinese characters (kanji) on a piece of paper for me. As the bus approached the stop, I would look up and down from the paper to the bus to try and match the characters up and.........the bus would be gone. I eventually learned that the bus to school was the 'Christmas tree bus' with the character　杉　and the bus home was the 'fish' bus with this character  交.

There were so many amazing moments in Japan ...I had a real live volcano close enough to my house that my bedroom was often covered in ash! I learned to eat raw fish. The shops were open on Sundays!! Japanese red wine tasted exactly the same as Japanese white wine! Japanese summers were hotter than Australian summers! Kumamoto ramen is the best ramen in the world! Shop assistants seemed to be origami experts when it came to wrapping your goods. Everything was so beautiful including the dishes served to you in restaurants, and on and on.

I studied full time for six months and came to love Japan and the Japanese language very much. It's a really difficult language and a lot depends on pure memorization of the characters, which helps me understand my Asian students' need to memorize things and see things written down. I've noticed that all Asian students 'write' new words on their hand with their finger to visualize the word. Japanese and Chinese are very visual languages as each character tells a 'story'. So much more meaning seems to be packed into a sentence with characters than an English sentence.

I had never ending visa hassles with several visa runs to Korea, and had to get a job with a visa as I couldn't seem to get a student visa. Thus, my period of being a full-time student sadly came to an end. I was very broke and had to work a lot to survive the cost of A$5 apples etc., so was always busy and tired.

The next phase of my Japanese life took me to Fukuoka, which I'll tell you about next time.