Week 6, Prompt 2 of 3

29. When you finally arrived, it was nothing like you imagined....

I had been to Japan before, for two weeks, when I was twenty-three.  The trip had gone by in a whirlwind and showed how much I didn't know about the world and travel.  I still think that if I hadn't been lucky enough to be able to stay with my uncle's friends, I wouldn't have had enough money to stay in a hotel every night.  Japan through the lens of someone sleeping on a park bench.
But that was then, this was two years later.  I had made friends with Japanese college students and tutored them in English.  I had studied the culture, read different books about the country, contemplated my foreign friends and tried to imagine living immersed in their culture.  I spoke only a handful of phrases, only the most basic greetings and questions.  I was virtually illiterate in their language.
After almost two years of trying, I was accepted into an exchange program, working as an assistant language teacher in a classroom.  The job was inconsequential.  In fact, the entire idea of the job terrified me.  I lied through my teeth at the interview about my love of teaching and the idea of working in a large classroom with people who couldn't understand me every day.  The job was just a means, a means to be in an exotic country, a means to travel and see exciting things.  A two week vacation had almost sucked my bank account dry.  Working there would give me a lot more opportunities to enjoy myself.
I left Maine in late July.  A sad time to leave Maine, because it is so full of life and vibrancy then, and therefore hard to leave.  Tokyo was disgustingly hot and humid.  The usual.  After three days of job orientation and falling into bed after every evening meal, we all boarded our trains and planes and headed off to our individual destinations.  I was going north, to Aomori.
Aomori.  It seemed like a sigh whenever I said the name.  I had never heard of the prefecture before, and may never have heard of it, if not for the book that I found under my hand in the University library.  I had been looking for culture books on Japan, no particular title really, and suddenly I saw below my hand - Aomori: Maine's Sister State.  It was a bilingual book dedicated to a connection across the seas to a place I never knew existed.  I was captivated immediately.
I quickly filled myself in on the details.  In the late 1800's a ship built in Bath Iron Works was caught up in a storm off the shore of a miniscule village known as Shariki, in the prefecture of Aomori.  The villagers put forth a daring rescue, and although they were only able to save four crew members, they absolutely went out of their way to care for the sailors, ensuring a safe return to their country.  In the 90's Bill Clinton declared Bath and Shariki sister towns and Maine and Aomori sister states.
This was exactly the kind of romantic story that captured my imagination.  I dreamed of meeting the locals and making wonderful friendships and sharing my Maine heritage with them.  Some of them would be so charmed that they would come to visit me in my country.  We would spend many hours exploring the wonders of Aomori together.  I would quickly learn the language and settle into a happy life punctuated with exciting travels and discoveries every day.
Oh, I had learned a little of Japan while I was there for my two week trip.  I honestly think my first thought while I was on a train from the airport was "how ugly their houses are!" (I have since then come to appreciate the beauty of the interiors, as well as the exteriors of the older houses.)  I knew the weather could be muggy, the trains uncomfortable (all those staring people, mesmerized by straw-colored hair).  But I still saw everything through rose colored lenses.  For weeks I daydreamed of my time in Aomori.  The job was something to dread, but the fringe benefits were waiting.
I was one of 40 others arriving in Aomori.  We got off the airplane at an airport as miniature as Bangor's.  We lined up and stood across from our supervisors, the person most responsible for our adjustment into work and society.  This would be the person who helped you read a bill you got in the mail or tell you where the nearest supermarket was.  A couple of people down from me, one teacher's supervisor had brought a necklace with blinking lights and put it on her head like a lei.  We all laughed.  I looked across at my supervisor.  He had glasses and thick, purple lips, like a fish, and smelled of cigarettes.  He had a nervous way about him, like the greasy lackey of a mob boss or something.  I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.
He and the company driver (I was to be placed in a local board of education building, visiting schools and using the BOE as my base camp every day) helped me pack my suitcase into the company car.  My supervisor spoke very little.  He obviously had limited English, despite being a teacher in the subject.  As we drove along the highway to my new home, we passed a dead dog.  I took it for a bad omen.
Each assistant language teacher in this particular program takes over the apartment of the former teacher.  I was no different in this case.  We arrived at a dismal cement apartment building complex flanked by car dealerships.  The supervisor said most of the apartments were abandoned because they were so old.  They had originally been housing for Japanese teachers.  Across the way was a middle school, but not one I would teach at, I was told.
I walked up the steps of the apartment and the driver and the supervisor showed me inside.  The place was a mess, garbage still in the garbage can, wet laundry still in the washer machine.  The supervisor seemed embarrassed and after setting my luggage down and a quick tour, we left.  We arrived at my new work place.  It was absolutely dead, being summer vacation and many of the employees out on vacation or more leisurely schedules.  I sat at my new desk with nothing to do, exhausted and frustrated.  After a couple of hours my supervisor said I could go home.  I hadn't understood his explanation of the bus system, so I decided to walk.
The next few weeks seemed designed to bring me misery.  Two days after arriving I woke, on my birthday, to find the kitchen and living room crawling with maggots.  Having eaten only take out and never using the garbage can, I hadn't realized that the previous tenant had left that warm pile of garbage stewing for some time.  They were the most disgusting things imaginable.  Ujimushi, 'maggots', was one of the first few words I learned my first week living in Japan.
I fell into a routine of coming home and hiding, or going to the store, getting what I needed, and rushing back home.  My skin crawled from all the people that stared at me.  I was one of four or so people in town with blonde hair, a town of 20,000.  Sometimes children pointed and shouted "gaijin!", "foreigner!"  Sometimes students would shout "Haro!" (their attempt at "hello) at me, feeling very daring for having made contact with a foreigner.  The middle school students across from my apartment stared and shouted constantly.  I grew to loathe that school.
I wallowed in depression.  Where was my romantic Aomori?  A few of my coworkers made the occasional attempt at friendship.  But my language skills and their work schedules limited our contact.  My supervisor, whom I privately thought of as "Fish Lips", was a man who irritated and offended me to the extreme.  I despaired of ever finding that secret Aomori that I had created in my heart.
Slowly, I fell into a rhythm.  I found the occasional store that I lingered in, instead of rushing home to hide.  I made friends with the girls that worked at the convenience store at the end of my street.  We never learned each other's names in the three years I lived there, but we enjoyed spontaneous interactions.  I took a perverse pleasure in being as random as possible.  I would suddenly swoop in with a bag of candy corn, explain to them the culture of Halloween in America, and then swoop out without having bought anything.  They saw me look longingly day after day at a display of clear plastic folders with a cute character on them.  You could only get them if you bought a particular product and accrued enough points.  They snuck me the folders when the promotion was over.
I mostly hated how much I stood out in crowds, but occasionally enjoyed my own twisted sense of humor, doing things that really made me stand out.  Like the time I was biking to work and saw an injured crow sitting in the middle of the road.  Cars were rushing by him, just inches away.  I couldn't see any visible injuries, but worried he would get hurt.  I ran out, scooped him up, and brought him to the side walk.  Then I worried about bicyclists, so I scooped him up again and put him on my arm.  He balanced there, seemingly unfazed.  And with a crooked smirk I turned to the busy road and spread my arms wide.  At the same time (I swear!) he unfurled his wings.  I couldn't help but laugh at the horrified faces of passersby.  I learned later that crows are a bad omen in Japan.  Although I can't be entirely sure that it was the crow that caught their attention, or my blonde hair.
My first year in Japan had popped every delusion I had and replaced it with reality.  The mundane, like paying for bills or figuring out how to make a reservation, and unexpected stress, like people knowing where you shopped yesterday and with whom, or telling you why your behavior was unacceptable in this culture, even though you didn't realize you weren't doing anything wrong.  But there were also the little treasures that kept me going.  Like my habit of driving down mysterious streets in the middle of nowhere, just to see where they went.  Sometimes they yielded nothing, but often I would find an amazing shrine, a gorgeous old home, or a stunning view.  There were also the treasures of the random connections I made.  Like when I finally got internet at my house and didn't need to go to the internet cafe in town anymore, the staff had gotten so attached to me that they bought me a present.  I gave them maple syrup from Maine as a thanks.
Whenever someone hears I've lived in Japan for three years, they immediately ask "how was it?"  Not realizing that that's the same as saying "how was your weekend?"  How do you sum up three years of your life?  So I often answer "complicated, but good."