REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK

All’s been silent on the blog front of late as I’ve gotten a little caught up in the post-Japan transition, doing things like job searching and apartment hunting.  Making new friends, catching up with old ones, doting on cute nephews.

The first couple of months I was back, people couldn’t stop asking me about whether or not it was weird being in the States. In a word: Yes. There’s a term for what happens when you return to your home country after living abroad for a while; it’s called “reverse culture shock.”

For me, reverse culture shock started from the moment I almost walked into a wall of beef jerky in the San Francisco airport. “America,” I said with reverence, craning my neck upwards to take in the wide assortment of beef strips. The wall of jerky was a sign. A message that I had returned to a land of choices, a place where, like the myriad of flavors on display, I could be among people of all races, ethnicities and creeds! No more being stared at everywhere I went, or sweating out half my body weight daily because there wasn’t any air conditioning. There would be napkins on tables, soap in bathrooms, trashcans on every corner, and things I hadn’t let myself think about for two years, like dishwashers and InSinkErators. Life was going to be convenient and amazing all the time.

That lasted for about a month.   

Soon I found myself thinking very un-American thoughts, like, “Why do we need 30 flavors and brands of granola? Wouldn’t 5 be OK?” I hid my eyes in like a bashful Puritan as people jogged past half-naked, sweat (and everything else) flying. I pushed away plates of dessert, all of which seemed too sweet.  

There were things that I didn’t need to do anymore but wanted to do, like taking off my shoes when I walked inside a house. There were things that I had to stop doing, like bowing to people in restaurants and department stores, or beginning every sentence with, “Well in Japan…” How they do things in Japan is fairly immaterial when you’re living someplace like America; you might as well start extoling the virtues of living on Mars.

Reverse culture shock comes in waves. Take today for instance, five months after leaving Japan. I was walking along the street, and there was this nice-looking older guy, a city worker, and I smiled at him. He smiled back, we exchanged greetings and wished each other a good day, and that was it. And it felt weird. 

I pondered this during the last two blocks home, because for two years I had been smiling and greeting and bowing to almost everyone I encountered back east, to the point where I thought my face and lower back might seize up. I guess I had more to prove then as a foreigner in a strange land. And yet, it was fun to see how people would react. Would they respond? If so, was it out of politeness or warmth? Would the other person giggle or look nervous and edge away?

In America, no one seems to want to make eye contact, whether it’s the person next to them on a packed train car, or a homeless person on the street. The thing is, that when people don’t look at you, they don’t see you. It’s kind of a strange distinction to make, but even though I got tired of people pointing and staring at me in Japan, at least they registered that I was there. What they saw may have given them mixed feelings, but I existed to them in a very real way. And for whatever reason, I don’t think we do that in America. It’s not that we don’t pay attention to people, but we pay attention for all the wrong reasons. We look to keep from running into others, or to anticipate potential threats, or to evade people handing out fliers or asking for money. We look to avoid people, not to engage them. That’s a kind of lonely world to live in.

If any of this sounds like regret at coming back, it’s not. It’s good to be moving on to the next chapter. Even if the new chapter involves skirting piles of feces on the sidewalk, hoping against hope that they are canine in origin, or having a stranger flash me through the blinds in his house. Welcome to San Francisco! Right?