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RD: What was it like getting used to being in Japan?

Me: Language was a huge difficulty right off the bat. There are those social niceties that people say so often that they kind of mumble them, and you can’t really pick them up until you’ve been listening for a long time. So those little things, and trying to mumble something back out, were pretty difficult at the start.

It was always difficult, actually, because it never really feels natural to say those things. So little utterances, like, you know when you don’t know what to say in English you just say um in English. In Japanese it’s a totally different sound but you want to say the English um even if you're speaking Japanese. Those were the things that I found hard to get used to.

Me: I never really considered Canada to affect the way I am. I’ve never considered that growing up in Canada has changed me in any way; I figured that if I grew up anywhere I’d be pretty much thee same person. I still kind of believe that, but seeing the way people in Japan are, it seemed like growing up in Japan changed them from what they would have been had they grown up somewhere else. Like, they're forced into a school system where they have these extremely stressful exams that really determine the rest of their lives. It shapes them and turns them into these adults that do nothing but work.

RD: What would you say you’ve learned about yourself, the world, important lessons learned?

Me: Probably that you can’t take anything at face value. The things that I had read about Japan I had assumed were the case, but I realized that only sometimes it's like that, or on the surface it’s like that; the more you get into things the more different it is and the more complex it is. I’ve learned not to take things at face value and to try to dig into what’s important and what's actually the case rather than what people want to be the case.