Symptoms of Culture Shock: Face Ache and…
Possibly the biggest effect of culture shock I’ve experienced was during my first teaching contract in Japan. Prior to the football World Cup in 2002 there were not that many signs or labels in English, so it wasn’t unusual for me to get completely lost and buy fish noodles instead of a lovely dessert. And of course, there’s the spoken language confusion – I ended up kicking out my slippered feet and shaking my chest samba-style (which doesn’t look great on a man) with a load of elderly Japanese ladies instead of the salsa lesson I had been looking forward to. One time my co-worker and I inadvertently ordered six meals between us – not wanting to waste the food or our modest salary we force fed ourselves until we were literally ready to burst.
But funnily enough, the above may not have happened due to the first cultural misunderstanding which almost led to me losing my job before I had even set foot in a classroom.
A job at a language school in Japan doesn’t come with great holidays so you have to make use of the national holidays to explore the fascinating country. It transpired that our week-long teacher training session was followed by a couple of days of national holiday. So my friend and I decided to take advantage of the weekend plus the extra days off to zoom down to one of the highlights of Japan: Kyoto.
We had a great time seeing the sights and immersing ourselves in Japanese culture, but all too quickly it was time to prepare to go back to Tokyo for our first day of teaching. The first thing to do was buy a bus ticket – we’d contemplated returning to Tokyo by Shinkansen (the bullet train) if the five-hour bus journey was a bit torturous, but it wasn’t so we decided to save money and buy a coach ticket back after we’d replenished our wallets at an ATM. Culture shock! ATM machines at that time only opened during bank opening hours – the banks were also on national holiday. Taking stock of our situation things were not looking good: we didn’t have enough money to get back to Tokyo for our first day at work; our credit cards were useless in Japan at that time; and neither of us could speak Japanese.
After some consideration we went to the 100 Yen shop (about one US dollar) and bought a big black marker and asked the lovely lady behind the counter, using sign language, if she had a spare cardboard box. She did, and then we managed to explain to her that we needed ‘Tokyo’ written in Japanese on the big piece of cardboard – she happily did that for us. We then headed to the nearest roundabout on a road which led north to Tokyo and stood there trying to look honest with our thumbs out. We were lucky – a couple of good Samaritans in the form of an elderly Japanese couple picked us up within five minutes! They couldn’t speak English and so my friend and I just smiled back at them via the rear-view mirror as we sat comfortably in the back seat – for five hours. They were wonderful – they insisted on buying us a snack at a service station with my friend and I still smiling and sort of bowing and eventually they dropped us off at a train station in Tokyo. Even after they’d left our faces were still frozen into a sort of smile-grimace. I literally had to massage the smile from my face. We’d made it and saved our jobs. I suppose the flipside of culture shock is that you can experience amazing acts of kindness and hospitality – especially with the delightful Japanese.
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