Month 1 Recap 🇯🇵

Here’s a summary of my first month in Japan, in case you’d rather not read each of my daily experiences.

31 days ago, I woke up in a new bed, in a new room, in a new town, in a new country. There was so much unfamiliarity all at once and it was a bit uncomfortable. I was required to quarantine for a few days, so I used my time in isolation to unpack, drink tea, FaceTime my mom, and adjust to the time difference. Jet lag punched me in the face and I’d say it took about a week to develop a normal sleeping schedule. My first week here was filled with trainings for my new job and I learned a long list of names in a short amount of time. The school at which I work is called MeySen Academy and it has two campuses: Maruyama and Takamori. I work at the Maruyama campus and my apartment is about a 3 minute walk away! I jumped right into classroom preparations for the first day of school and welcomed the kindergartners on April 11th. It would have been really difficult to set up a new classroom all by myself in a time crunch along with the weight of recently moving into a new country, but I was lucky to have an experienced co-teacher who helped me with bulletin boards, lesson prep, classroom organization, locating things around the building, and settling-in in general. She was also in the classroom when students arrived to help me learn how to teach routines and English to the kindergartners. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without her! In a normal year, I would have had months to settle in and learn these things, but COVID pushed back my departure date and everything had to be squished into a tighter time frame. The first day of school felt completely surreal because it was the destination point of my biggest dream. I wish I could describe the feeling, but I can’t. Maybe you know that feeling. When I met my sixteen four-year old kindergartners, my heart almost burst out of my chest. Meeting them was a lot more challenging than I had anticipated because of the language barrier. Asking them how they were feeling or about their favorite color was pointless because they could not understand a word I was saying. So for the first couple of days, I used a lot of hand gestures, facial expressions (under a mask), and pointing to pictures to communicate with them. Since then, they have learned how to say “Good morning, Miss Melia”, “goodbye”, “hello”, “okay”, “banana”, and sometimes “bathroom”, although they say many things to me in Japanese and I just have to shrug my shoulders and ask them to show me. They soak up more and more English every day like tiny little sponges. It’s amazing! The skills they arrived with impressed me the most, like putting a puzzle together as a team, being able to button their smocks by themselves, eating with chopsticks (some of them), putting a tiny sticker on the correct day of the month on their calendars, and more. There’s definitely a big difference between American parenting and Japanese parenting… I’ll have more to say on that later. At this point, students have learned most of the routines at school, we’ve done a couple art projects, and I’ve been able to get to know their silly personalities. Here’s a basic layout of a day at school, in case you were wondering how it works:

• Arrive at school/morning routine
• Playtime or Stations
• English lessons (songs, stories, poems, phonics, chants)
• More playtime outside
• More English lessons (sometimes a class craft)
• Japanese class (40 minutes with a different teacher)
• Lunch/Playtime
• Afternoon stations
• Dismissal

Outside of school/work, I have ventured into a world where I’m in the minority. Going to the grocery store is especially difficult not only because I don’t speak Japanese, but also because the labels are in Japanese, I don’t know what exactly I’m looking at most of the time, I have to use yen, and I get a lot of strange looks. I don’t mind much though. As for adventure, I have witnessed the wonders of blooming Sakura trees, treated my tastebuds to Japanese soup curry, introduced myself to downtown Sendai, walked through Funaoka park, scalded my tongue on fresh taiyaki, confidently ordered a cow tongue dish, and most importantly, took a day trip to Matsushima Bay. All with the help and company of coworkers, of course. Before arriving, I was worried I wouldn’t ‘click’ with my coworkers or find friends quickly, but I’m happy to say that all of the people I’ve met are kind-hearted, fun-spirited, and make me feel welcome in this new, unfamiliar place. Whew!

I feel safe, I feel comfortable, I feel happy, I feel blessed.
But I also feel uneasy, frustrated, nostalgic, and lonely. I still have much to learn both as a teacher and as a person in a new culture, but with frequent reflections (and phone calls home), I think I’ll be okay. There’s so many things I’m excited to see, taste, and experience and I hope you’ll stick around on this journey with me.

PS: The earthquakes here are not as scary as I anticipated. So far, I’ve felt four earthquakes and they were very small. Japan is very prepared for earthquakes, so I’m not as worried as I once was.