Home

My apartment is set up to a rough approximation of the way I want it and most of my things have found a home somewhere on the premises. There remains only a small coffee table's worth of belongings as yet unsorted, and I can live with that for a while. Can and probably will. I am now firmly over the initial shock of being instantly illiterate, literally and culturally. Staying in Okayama for a week was immensely productive in terms of my adjustment to this new place. I see it as a kind of purgatorial quarantine, not of me from Japan, but of Japan from me. My world had just been turned upside down and I was so off-kilter from the experience that I couldn't even bring myself to eat at a restaurant for several days. I spent most of the week hiding from the foreign world beyond my door. By the end of the week I was finally moderately at ease with my surroundings and ready to learn how to navigate this society, and then it was off again on a bullet train, away from the small support group of people undergoing the same changes and challenges I was. During the times I was awake, I went through a lot of the same emotional up-and-downturns that I had felt as my plane neared land again this side of the Pacific. More muted versions thereof, but from a similar vein. This time I was going alone to the place that I would begin to live alone, trying my best to fit in in a place that I never will. It was on the train that I realized the real usefulness of the week of training I had undergone. Yes, the company policy and practice had been impressed on me and I was given the opportunity to get back in to dealing-with-kids mode, but the most productive feature of this week was to ease me in to Japanese society. I didn't really even shop that week. I wasn't on my own and I didn't have to try to figure everything out unaided. Which is not to say that I do now, for my coworkers and budding friends have made it abundantly clear that they are close at hand should I need them, but a week to adjust without the added pressure of my first few days at a new job and alone in a new town did me more good than perhaps I can describe. I think that this function of the training week is not accidental, and the company is to be commended for their foresight in planning the arrival of new teachers this way. I arrived in Nagano ready to meet my new boss and the newest iteration of my life, ready to satisfy curiousities and make new explorations.

Okayama was vastly different to me than Nagano. Both in the personal experience and as a city. I suppose that should not come as a surprise. I was hesitant to put much time or energy in to exploration in Okayama, knowing that I was only there for a week and would then have to do it all again here in Nagano. It felt overwhelming, but maybe that was more a function of the new half of the globe I had found myself standing on. It did not feel like the same sort of place to me that Nagano feels like, and I already feel at home here. It's probably all a result of some subconscious block that refused to let me feel settled until I arrived where I was really going. Now I feel fine.

I have been in Nagano for a week now, training under my predecessor, who handed me progressively more classes to plan and teach over the course of the week. He has been invaluable to me, as I may have already said, both at work and in my Nagano education. I have gotten used to having him around, and just in time, because now I am a fully fledged employee and teacher and he is unemployed, soon to leave. I have only learned how to live in Nagano with him here to rely on, it will be a different experience yet living here without him. The changes come a week at a time, and each one alters the way I am living.