I’m standing in Japan Post Bank, people waiting in rows of seats behind me, clutching file folders full of paperwork. I’m waiting at the registration counter, having already spent the last half hour working on trying to open a bank account. The banker, a young Japanese woman, comes rushing back, handing me back the form I just filled out. 

<I’m sorry… please… write your name again, all capital letters…>

I sigh. This may take awhile. 

It’s been a few weeks since I arrived in Tokyo. It’s been a whirlwind of paperwork, settling into my dorm, and starting school.

Oh, and giant Gundams.

I’m living in Fujimidai, which is located in Nerima Ward in Northwestern Tokyo. It is a glorious town, complete with excellent access to the Tokyo Metro (very close to the bustling area of Ikebukuro), Shakuji-koen, the second largest park across Tokyo, second only to Ueno, and it only takes 45 minutes to reach Sophia University, that gorgeous centre of knowledge, nestled in the middle of Yotsuya Ward, which also plays home to the Japanese Diet Building and the very controversial Yasukuni Shrine!

A friend of mine (right) and I posing with the Fujimidai sign at our train stop. The name roughly translates to ‘place from which one can see Fuji’.

First of all, I have got to mention the stuff I had to go through before classes finally started, not to mention the reason it took me awhile to finish this post!! Japan is notoriously famous for their efforts to find illegal workers, the two most prolific being police asking foreigners to see their passports (not carrying it with you results in a fine), and the fingerprinting and mugshot process you go through when entering the country. Now, since we as students are staying longer than the typical tourist visa, we are issued resident cards to avoid the inconvenience of having to constantly carry our passports around. While this is nice, we also have to go register our addresses at our local ward office within 14 days of landing.

Now, I speak pretty decent Japanese, especially after UBC’s grueling Intensive Intermediate Japanese courses, which I took last year. Thanks to that, I was more than capable of filling out all of the paperwork at the aforementioned ward office. I had to write out a form notifying them where I live, as well as do this whole other process to get national health insurance, and get a certificate to prove that I did all of this for Sophia. Halfway through the process, I realized something striking: there was absolutely no other language support. Being in Japan, this wouldn’t be a surprise, but one look around my dorm will tell you that a lot of students that come over here can barely string a sentence together, because they’re either beginners or low-intermediate speakers at most. I immediately realized how much I took my skill for granted, because most people had to bring a friend or a helper along to do that paperwork, as well as open a bank account, get a phone sim card, or fill in applications at school.

Once that was all dealt with, it was time to take my Japanese Language Placement Test at Sophia. I was amazed, again, just how prepared I was for it, thanks to UBC. The intensive program in Vancouver was really difficult, mostly due to its fast pace. We went through the entirety of An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese in a year, which is no easy feat. The good news is, Sophia’s Japanese language program has a course that immediately follows that textbook, and I totally got in. Because I am obviously amazing. I could not believe how close the classes were, it pretty much picked up exactly where the last one left off. So for the last couple weeks, I have been taking Intensive Japanese, which is a double-credit course that is three hours every freakin’ morning. We have quizzes every morning, a presentation, a unit test, and a written composition every week.

Maybe this is why I get called a masochist?

This is me pawing at a sign of my favourite restaurant’s food, a simple dish called doria, which is a bowl of rice topped with pasta sauce, meat, and melted cheese.

My other classes are very nice, I am taking a literature course all about Modern Japanese Fiction, and an Anthropology course about modern and post-modern theory, which is actually taught by a Canadian professor who is visiting this year! He is literally the only other Canadian person that I have met on this whole trip so far. Everybody else that I have met have been students from all across Europe, Pakistan, Indonesia, other parts of Asia, and the United States. When I take the train, I stick out like a sore thumb that has gotten infected and probably needs to be amputated. As a result, I have been stared at a lot, and the usual profiling that I expected has indeed occurred. If I speak Japanese to people, I often get answers in broken English, even though I am speaking in full sentences, and I have already been turned away from a gym because of my tattoos (because I totally look like a yakuza gangster, right?). Worst yet, some of my friends have been turned away from restaurants for being foreigners. I am doing my best to ‘read the air’, as they say in Japanese, which essentially means to read the mood around you and act appropriately, because I am horribly aware of the stereotype that has been slapped onto foreigners (‘gaikokujin‘), and it’ll take a lot for those labels to start going away.

Not like it really matters though, I love Tokyo and I have otherwise gotten right back into the swing of things here! I can navigate the transit, I am way more functional in the language than I expected, and oh my god all of the food. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a convenience store or a full restaurant, it is just all great. My school’s cafeteria has everything from pork cutlet rice bowls to Japanese noodle soup, and it’s all much cheaper than Vancouver. Every weekend, I am making an effort to go for nice walks in the local parks (one of which is chock-full of rare birds!) and exploring different areas, like Shibuya and Odaiba, which is the place with the really, really big Gundam.

Tomorrow, I will venture out to Saitama, a town to the north of Tokyo, which has one of the oldest temples in Japan. From there, who knows what could be next? I definitely want to check out Kamakura, Osaka, Hokkaido… sky’s the limit, really! ‘Til then, I big thee adieu, and until next time, reader!