Through Foreign Eyes

Leaving the familiar faces and the comfort of the walls you’ve known as long as you can remember is indeed, daunting. It’s not as if you will never go back. It’s just the fear of the unknown – what lies ahead? Will I be able to swim around this new strange land that my eyes have only touched in colorful videos and the glossy pages of my textbooks?

And yet, you gave it a go, a heartfelt “yes” with your eyes brimming with both excitement and fear. Before you knew it, you’re hopping into the plane en route to Japan, saying your tearful “see you soon”, “be sure to call me” and “take care” to your family.

It may seem a long journey – probably difficult, probably scary but definitely worthwhile. Soon, however, you will pack your backs and you will have to say your “be sure to keep in touch” and “take care” to your newfound friends.

This article is intended to offer you a glimpse of what it is like to live as a 留学生(ryuugakusei) or Foreign student (you will be holding on to that title for a while).  Written below are based from my own experience.  

  

Phase 1: The Adjustment

As soon as you take your first step in the concrete lands of Japan, it will feel as if everything is a moving picture. The beauty that suddenly is tangible feels too overwhelming. The phrases that you hear from your audio tapes in your class suddenly fall from the lips of real people. The food that you so longingly wanted to try tasted unlike how you imagined them to be (delicious or disgusting as you may have expected it). You unpack your bags and quietly arrange them in the corners of your room – a home you will call it for a year or so. You will be reluctant to travel around the city for a while. You will draw a map of it in your palms and mark an ‘X’ to the places that you deem safe. You will be greeted by your new professors, your new classmates and your new subjects to take. You will have to speak Japanese every single time and will find comfort in speaking your native tongue when you met a fellow from the same country. You will always feel tired from all the adjusting and will fill this insatiable rush coursing through you at the same time from all this possibilities lain before you.

Phase 2: Lectures, Friends and Routines

You finally have settled down. The scary streets are not so frightening no more. The ‘new’ faces are now your friends and people you can lean on. The moving pictures are now places familiar to you. You can walk on them like they are the streets you’ve grown up at. You are still frightened of the locals but somehow have the courage to strike a conversation with them. You will go to class, receive loads of homework and somehow, still find a way to go to parties organized by your classmates and go drinking and talking with them until dawn. You will fall into this ‘routine’ where you add beautiful moments each time in your life.

Phase 3:  What lies ahead

You felt that your Japanese have improved. You can now write coherent sentences and you can report in front of class whilst your shaking knees and fingers. You have somehow gotten to around Japan, marking your map with an ‘O’ for each places you’ve touched. You have tons of photos and videos of you and your friends, but you also have tons of photos of the beautiful sunsets and sunrises that you knew will forever remained tattooed in your memories. Then, questions of “what will you do after you go home?” start pouring in. You are caught off guard each time you hear one. ‘Where should I go?”, “What should I do after?” crowds your head. You look ahead, you sketch a map and everything gets more confusing. Soon, you will leave this place and the reality will start seeping in. And yet, no matter how lost you feel you might be, deep in your heart, you know that you will find what you are looking for because you managed to survive a year or so in a land so alien before to you which now you can call home.

 I haven’t reached the last phase but I am heading there soon. It is hard to imagine saying goodbye to the scent of the breeze gently making its way to you in the morning. I cannot bear to part with the friends I have shared so many great lessons, failures and success and adventures with. Somehow, someway, I know that because of this experience as 留学生 or foreign student, I know that I can get through whatever comes ahead of me.

Sometimes, being lost and confused is a good place to start, you know?