This is a TTT: a Throwback Travel Tuesday! While we were moving, I discovered a portable hard-drive with tons of pictures, all the way back from my first deployment up through my first tour in Hawaii – including my first trip to Japan! Also this is the trip where I hit one of my more-asked-about Challenges Accepted items, “Visiting a country solo where I didn’t speak the language.” So let me tell you the story of my first visit to Japan, and how a tall then-blonde foreigner learned to absolutely love the Japanese language and culture.
The first time I was stationed in Hawaii, I was part of a training team that traveled all throughout the South Pacific and South-East Asia. We worked with partner forces in both American protectorates and host nations to improve their training plans, resource management, and mission effectiveness, and in the process, we learned a lot about other cultures and, I hope, managed to teach our partner forces some good things about us as well.
One of my absolute favorite trips was a month-long training trip I took to Kumamoto, Japan, to work with the Japanese National Self-Defense Forces during a joint training exercise. It had been one of my dreams to visit Japan {I grew up studying Japanese martial art systems and culture} and to finally have this opportunity was amazing.
However, this was still relatively early in my days of traveling, so I didn’t prepare as much as I do now. I spoke almost no Japanese…and in Kumamoto, pretty much no one spoke English. During training, we had interpreters, but other than that, we were on our own!
That wasn’t going to stop me. I wanted to explore and I wanted to learn, so I bought several books on Japanese from the bookstore at our training post and studied like a mad-woman.
I went out on the town and practiced. At first, I was self-conscious, but when I saw just how much the people in town warmed up when they saw I was trying, I lost that. I spent a lot of time in local shops and restaurants, pointing at things and the lovely people there would repeat words for me until I was pronouncing them correctly.
I have to admit, I was nervous about this at first mostly because the Japanese culture is extremely homogenous. As a tall then-blonde {yeah, I went through a bleach phase} gaijin/foreigner, I stuck out like a sore thumb. All the security briefings we normally get that tell us to blend in were absolutely useless to me there {I did wear a hat over my hair a lot of the time just so I wouldn’t stick out quite as much, but after a while, I stopped}. I can’t say enough about the value of learning the culture, though. I talked to everyone I could about what I should and shouldn’t do, what places were okay to go and which ones I should avoid, the proper decorum for visiting historical sites and shrines, entering restaurants, eating food, and everything possible. I got the crash course in manners, and did my absolute best to observe them.
Granted, I was still a foreigner and I wasn’t going to be able to change that in anyone’s mind, but I could at least be the best behaved foreigner I could, and it worked.
By the end of my month-long immersion in Japanese culture and language, I was conversational enough to order food in restaurants, ask directions, shop in the stores without pointing and making people write down prices, and basically get around in town. That fostered a love of the Japanese language that I have to this day.
I was even able to play tour-guide for friends I’d made at the training exercise. We had a great time out on the town, exploring the historical sites and shops, and even dining on the local fare {including the local delicacy, basashi - which I tried for culture’s sake, but because I love horses dearly am not going to seek out on my own}.
My experience in Kumamoto, and later on in Tokyo and Kyoto, as a solo traveler in a country where I didn’t speak the language, only fueled my travel confidence and desire to see more of the world. Looking back through these pictures, though, I’m longing to go back and see the wonderful art, architecture, and culture of Japan again. It made such an impact on me, not just because of its beauty, but because of the confidence boost that being able to learn and absorb a new language and culture gave me.
訪問していただきありがとうございます！
KCS
Pronounced: homon shite itadaki arigatogozaimasu Means: thank you for visiting