You want it? You got it!

My car guy Ross, originally from Australia, calls Hokkaido “Fantasy Island”. Over the seven or so months that I’ve been here, I’ve really gotten to understand exactly what he means.

I feel that the Japanese people really like to be comfortable and in actual fact like to make others feel comfortable as well. This is evident through the greetings one receives when entering any store or restaurant in Japan, peoples over politenesses in traffic, or through the amazing hospitality that Japanese families show their guests. What always blows me away are the ways in which Japanese people will answer a question or request above and beyond, and that more often than not, people will go out of their way to help you the best way they know how. And if they don’t know how, they will literally run off and find someone who can do a better job. A couple of recent examples, this last week the music teacher asked me if I was watching the Olympic games. To be honest, I haven’t been too consistent with watching events and didn’t even know if I could watch the games on my TV, which only has basic Japanese farmer vision. I tried explaining that my TV only has 6 channels and didn’t know if I got the Olympics. The science teacher beside me of course overheard this and started explaining TV’s to me and offered to come to my house to check my cables and install an antenna. In the meantime, the music teacher ran off and brought back an assortment of printouts of final results from the games. This was totally appreciated and it looked as if most of the teachers didn’t have anything to do at the time, including myself, so I didn’t mind. These kinds of events happen quite frequently.

This Sunday, I was working on my computer, when my friend’s mom came to the door and told me about her friend who knows someone that’s been living in Winnipeg for the past eight years, who just returned, and lives several blocks from my house in Japan. She ended up phoning her friend and handed me the phone so that we could connect. My friend’s mom tried to phone her son in order for him to tell me this information, yet she couldn’t get a hold of him and she didn’t have my number. So, she ended up coming to my house, picked me up, and drove me to her friends house to have dinner with his family, who ended up feeding me about 6 different dishes, 2 of which I couldn’t finish, and sent me off with a bottle of orange juice and a couple of small wrapped cakes. Basically, I will never go hungry in this country.

Hokkaido is a really fun place to be. You mention to anyone that you are interested in trying something or doing anything, and someone will make things happen. I mentioned to the music teacher that I was interested in learning to play the guitar a couple of months ago. Last week, he approached me and invited me to his beginner class starting next month. I’ve mentioned that I love cycling to some of the teachers when they asked me what my hobbies are, and I think that I am now part of a cycling group? Going to go cycling on a frozen lake on Wednesday with a couple of the members by the way.

What really amazes me is how it seems everyone knows each other in Hokkaido. Japanese people love coming together. They love their groups, clubs, communities, and places of social interaction, karaoke being one example of many. Over all, Japanese people genuinely love getting to know one another, despite having to go through a few invisible walls to get there. With an island as small as Hokkaido, and a people as sociable as the Japanese, it seems as if everyone knows each other, or at the very least wants to know everyone, foreigners included. Although that’s not completely true, if true at all, for purposes of making this paragraph help me sound like an anthropologist, we will say that there is some truth to that assertion. In any case, Hokkaido does feel much smaller and more connected in comparison with other places that I’ve lived. I feel that this has affected my outgoingness as well, and having a car definitely helps. I really believe that the places one lives has an enormous affect on the ways in which people interact with one another and the way’s which people behave, despite language barriers. In Japans case, it seems as though you can find even the most looseriest foreigners become confident and more outgoing by the time that they leave Japan, a lot of the times with the most beautiful Japanese girls attached to their waist (cross my fingers!). So, perhaps there is some truth to my previous claim after all?

As most of my previous journals, I end up talking more about culture and my observations and opinions of them then I do about all the different things that I’ve experienced so far. I feel that if I only wrote about all the different things that “fantasy island” has conjured up for me to do, my hands would become burnt out from typing so much. My hope for people reading these journals is that they get a glimpse of one persons perspective and observations on the very large and complex topic of culture. As one person did not create all the elements of a single culture such as the Japanese’s own, one person can’t possibly be expected to give full incite to it. Take these observations as a grain of salt. That being said, one thing that I think most people will agree on, is how overwhelmingly hospitable Japan’s people are.