Over naan at a family-run Northern Indian restaurant in the heart of suburban Tokyo, my friend asked me, “what made you decide that you wanted to stay in Japan forever?”
At some point in this Substack, I intend to lay out for you the basics of “calling” and “vocation” that I learned from Charles Oswald’s So Send I You, which parses out the more spiritual, abstract tenets of following God’s leading to other lands, but today, same as I answered my friend in that tiny restaurant, I want to tell you about the practical steps I took to entrench myself—like a leech or well-watered tree, you decide—in my Tokyo life.
Without my typical, further ado, I present to you: what God helped me do in order to make my future in a foreign land.
Learn the language
This is on the very tip-top of my list. I firmly believe you can’t fully experience a country if you don’t make a concentrated effort to learn the language of the people you’re living among. As I’ve expressed in a previous post, the culture of the Japanese people is conveyed through its language, right down to the very sentence structure and verb conjugation. There is so much that I wouldn’t have learned about the grateful, humble slant of Japanese daily living if I hadn’t become fairly conversational in the Japanese language.
Furthermore, Japan is a country where you can’t dig deep if you can’t speak the language. The majority of Japanese people can’t carry on a conversation in a foreign tongue, including English, and so if you limit yourself to English, you’re limiting yourself to a very small pool of relationships when it comes to heart-level conversations. This is NOT to say that God cannot use people in Japan unless they speak Japanese! I’m just saying that, for someone who wants to live and work and dwell in Japan long-term, language acquisition is key, unless you are comfortable with focusing your ministry primarily on English speakers.
Also, if you can’t read Japanese, you might try to flush a toilet in a lavatory in a Japanese bus but accidentally press the emergency stop button, instead, which is something I may or may not have done once.
Find activities that the locals participate in
This is why I started taking ballet classes in Tokyo! About a year into my stay in Tokyo, I began realizing that every single one of my daily activities was either foreigner-oriented or involved enough foreigners that the majority language was English. For example, most of my friends were language school friends or friends from church who were fluent in English. My work was almost entirely in English, aside from Japanese texts and emails to students’ parents. Even my favorite cafés and restaurants were English-friendly! In an effort to immerse myself in a more authentic Japanese life, I began taking ballet classes.
You may astutely point out that ballet originated in Italy and France, not Japan (unless you’re one of the people of the persuasion that ballet actually began in China, which is still, you know, definitively not Japan). This is true. However, my ballet classes were all taught in Japanese, except for one of my teachers, who spoke English like a native and would sometimes explain things to me in my own language after class. I was the only foreigner in the ballet classes, except for one or two dancers from Korea, who spoke fluent Japanese. With the bright and shining exception of a Japanese woman who became one of my best friends, none of my classmates conversed with me in English; it was all Japanese, or at least, my attempts at Japanese. When it came to Japanese, it was either sink or swim dance.
An important note: part of the reason I chose ballet was because I was already somewhat familiar with it from my childhood, and I knew that even if I couldn’t understand the teacher’s words, I could at least watch his steps and mimic them. I recommend this approach for anyone who’s a beginner in whatever language they’re learning: choose something you already know something about, and make it easier on yourself by choosing something that involves visual learning in case you can’t catch all the words.
Don’t shy away from the “weird” food…
…and remember, there is no such thing as an inherently “weird” food; there’s just “what I’m used to” and “what I’m not used to.” Just because you didn’t grow up eating it doesn’t mean it isn’t someone else’s norm.
I had a rule for myself in Japan: I would never reject food given to me. Sure, there are foods like natto (fermented soybeans), octopus, and squid that you will never catch me ordering for myself in a restaurant, but I also won’t refuse to eat them if a friend serves them up on my plate. Particularly in Japan, rejecting food from someone is synonymous with rejecting their hospitality.
You can also learn a lot about a culture through its cuisine. When you partake in a beautifully-arranged Japanese feast, you recognize that in Japan, presentation is actually considered more important than taste (at least, according to the Japanese individuals I’ve spoken to). In food, and in all other walks of life, beauty and order are paramount.
In addition, you’ll also learn the emphasis on health and wellbeing that Japan promotes. The average Japanese person consumes 30 different types of vegetables a day. No wonder the Japanese life expectancy is almost a solid decade longer than the American life expectancy!
Don’t outsource all your friends
If you spend most of, or even a lot of, your social time connecting with friends from far away, you’ll end up doing what I (regrettably) did for the first few months of my stay in Japan: digging into relationships with people you can’t physically be around and ignoring relationships available to you in your present community. In most cases, the people God plants around you who are geographically close are the people He calls you to prioritize. You may also exacerbate “homesickness” by spending your time trying to plant yourself in a life that’s thousands of miles away from you. Furthermore, in-person friendships offer hugs, which is sometimes all we truly need.
Also: make friends with the locals. If all your friends are foreigners, then you won’t get to know the culture on a personal level.
Ask yourself, “What can I learn about God from this culture?”
This alone can cement you into a culture more than just about anything else.
For those of us who grew up in a community where just about everybody looks, speaks, lives, and thinks like us, our temptation in living in another land is to see things as “weird” or even “wrong” when often, they’re just cultural. In a former article, I’ve discussed how Japanese culture is highly indirect, which I disliked at first but eventually grew to recognize as Biblical in many ways. Instead of holding tight to the belief that American directness is better, I grew in my understanding of harmony and peace as maintained by gentle language.
In addition, a friend and I were recently discussing the experience of visiting a Japanese shrine when countless Japanese were going to pray. We talked about how we did not believe that Shintoism is the way to God, of course (I am lower-case “e” evangelical, after all), but we also mused on the fact that the Japanese worshipers exhibited a sense of unified awe and reverence that we find lacking in our Western Christian gatherings. It would have been easy to write off every bit of the experience as “theologically incorrect,” but actually, we walked away asking ourselves, “how can we learn from this so that we hold God and community in as sacred a light as these devout worshipers do?”—as well as walking away with a newly-refreshed vigor to share the really, really Good News.
Long story short, learning about God as manifested through the traces of Him and His work in other countries is a much more learning-conducive approach than merely turning up our noses at the things that conflict with our worldviews.
Finally: plan to live there forever unless God tells you “no”
If I had moved to Tokyo thinking, “aw, I don’t know, this might just be temporary,” I would have subconsciously prevented myself from fully investing in the language, culture, and people there. Trust me—I accidentally did this when I moved to Mexico. If you have a “this is going to be temporary, maybe” mindset, you’ll end up with a “this is going to be temporary, maybe” lifestyle. A person who thinks they may be uprooted soon will be tempted not to dig their roots deep.
The key is to say, “this is where I’m staying, unless God makes it clear He wants me somewhere else.” See, you’re not telling God, “you can’t relocate me!!” but you’re also not keeping yourself in a stage of uncertainty. In fact, when I first moved to Japan, I went so far as to tell everyone right off the bat that I intended to stay there forever. After all, making plans isn’t a problem; it’s only when we are so resolute in those plans that we don’t let God change them that we run into a pickle.
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And there you have it: Why a White Girl Who Knew Nothing about Manga, Anime, Mario Kart, Sushi, Studio Ghibli, J-Pop, or Pokémon Decided to Stay in Japan, Slightly Undermined by the Fact That I Am Currently on a Detour in New York.
I have so much dang respect for you. There's a kind of strength that can only come with accidentally hitting the emergency stop on the bus in a foreign country.