Going on 13 years in Japan 🗾🎎🗻
Hokkaido 1999: does the year explain the hair?
How did I get to thirteen years?
December 1997-June 2002: I arrived in Japan in December 1997 to work for Aeon English conversation schools. It hadn’t been my dream to work in Japan, necessarily. I was finished with undergrad after three rather difficult and uninspiring years and wanted to live abroad. My parents said that was fine as long as the country was Japan, since it was a safe country. My father’s faith in Japan’s safety stemmed from his visit to Tokyo in 1968. His few weeks in the country made an indelible impression. My brother and I used chopsticks almost as soon as we learned Western cutlery; our family dined regularly at Japanese restaurants; we greeted one another with ohayo gozaimasu in the mornings and konnichiwa in the afternoons. When my father made dinner (he is an excellent cook) he would ask us if we wanted sukoshi (a little) or takusan ( a lot) when serving our plates. Always takusan for the first serving.
Aeon English conversation schools recruited me from the United States and brought me over to work in Kasukabe, a suburb of Tokyo. I worked there for several years, and then switched to a company that offered reduced hours so that I could study Japanese and prepare for graduate school. In fall 2002, I entered graduate school at the University of California San Diego in the department of anthropology. I was interested in studying psychological anthropology. This subfield of anthropology is concerned with, among many things, how culture shapes personal experience over the lifetime. I decided to focus on the adolescent years and how friendship, the Japanese culture of friendship, shapes the experience of teenagers in Japan.
April 2006-March 2008: During my second stint in Japan, I conducted two years of anthropological field work in Kasukabe, the same suburban Tokyo town where I worked when I first arrived in 1997. I received a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) and participated in the research lab at the University of Tokyo's social psychology department. After completing my research, I returned to the United States, got married, finished my dissertation, took a job at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and had a daughter.
June 2015-present: In 2014, my husband was offered a job in Tokyo. In June 2015, after fulfilling my spring teaching commitments, my daughter, my dog, and I joined my husband. He had arrived three months prior, since the Japanese school year begins in April, and had already found a lovely house for us in Tokyo, which was nearby a very lovely preschool where my daughter attended, and my younger daughter, who we had after we arrived in Tokyo, attends now.
That is how I reached thirteen years in Japan.
Himejijo 2007: with my husband, then fiance, bliss😊
On the train from Tokyo to Kasukabe 2019: When we didn’t have to wear masks everywhere we went. Guess who’s the chatterbox of the family?
