While I have typically written about learning and education up until this point, I think I’d like to take the time to discuss some of my experiences living in a foreign country. As some of my students are interested in study abroad programs at various Japanese universities, I think it might be interesting to discuss some of my own experiences with living abroad.

I had just turned 19 not long before I arrived in Japan for the first time. I was in the United States Marines at that point and had been for slightly less than a year. Near the end of my training, I was given several options for where I would like to serve. My choices were the United States (West), United States (East), and overseas. Knowing that Marines with my job that served overseas were basically only located in Japan, I realized that this was essentially a way to visit a foreign country for free, so I selected the overseas option with the hope of going to Okinawa. Fortunately for me, Okinawa was in fact the location that was selected for me, so after a month of leave, I went to Okinawa.

When I got to Okinawa, it was night and I couldn’t see very much, but one of the first things I noticed after leaving the airport was that the Marine that was driving the car that I was in was driving on the left side of the road. In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road and I had not previously been aware of Japan being a left-side-drive country, so it was interesting to see that as soon as I got there, especially as in most countries in the world, you drive on the right side. I have now been in Japan for so long that it looks quite strange to me to see cars driving on the right side of the road, and when I went back to the United States several years ago, I felt rather uncomfortable when my father picked me up at the airport and started driving on the right side of the road.

One of the other things that I discovered rather quickly was that taxi drivers have a lever of sorts that they can use to open the door of their taxi to let passengers in quickly. As most Americans on Okinawa don’t have any other way to go from place to place, we mostly used taxis to travel when we were not on bases. As American taxis don’t have this sort of door-opening mechanism, I was extremely surprised to see the door open for me automatically when I flagged a taxi for the first time. At first, I thought that perhaps the taxi driver maybe had really long arms or was rather flexible, which allowed him to open the door without leaving his seat, but when he took me to where I was going, I saw him operate the lever and open the door that way. In the United States, you typically tip the taxi driver, but there is no tipping at all in Japan, which I knew in advance, so I did not tip the driver, as I knew he’d just return it to me.

On the subject of tipping, tipping is one thing that is definitely not done in Japan that took some time to get used to. It felt quite strange to not tip staff at nice restaurants or in taxis or at the barber shop when I got my hair cut. As tipping is part of American culture, I felt sort of misplaced or as if I wasn’t doing what I should have done, as if it was expected of me, but I got used to it eventually.

These are just some of the differences between the United States and Japan that I encountered when I came to Japan for the first time, and there are more, as well. In general, I think that most people will likely encounter similar differences when they travel to a country for the first time. Culture shock can perhaps take some time to adjust to, but in general, I feel that the differences are part of what makes living in a foreign country interesting.