"Travel involves a change in perspective, perception, and sense of time. Removing myself from my own routines and experiencing different viewpoints are essential to seeing things in different ways. In fact, reorientation of perspective is a major factor in my work."
I find this to be a rather interesting quote because of how true it rings, especially when I look back on my time in Japan. This trip was the first time I had ever been out of the U.S. (except for a few trips to Canada; do they even count?). I had no idea what to expect when it came to spending a significant amount of time in a truly foreign country. In the past I tried to imagined what it would be like because I had been dying to travel to Japan for years, but I had never imagined how much I would have to change in order to really appreciate and embrace the country. It was a huge help to be traveling with such a great group and being led by people who had been to the country before, not to mention all of the preparation we did beforehand. I definitely feel like if I went by myself with no preparation, there's no way I would have learned as much as I did or had as good of a time as I did on this trip.
I found it odd and a bit uncomfortable at first to experience how differently the Japanese think and do things, and it made me really step back and realize how much of an outsider I really was there. It was the little things that I noticed the most. It took a while to get used to walking on the left side of the stairs and escalators, and keeping my trash with me until I finally found a garbage can (which were few and far between). As the week went on, however, I feel like I adapted more and more to Japanese social norms and the culture, making me more able to blend in with the rest of the crowd. By the end of the week, I was very comfortable walking around the city no longer feeling like everyone was staring at me. The hardest thing to adapt to was how quiet the Japanese are. There were plenty of times on the subway where we would be the only passengers talking, and talking quite loudly, while the rest of the car sat in silence. It was certainly a cultural difference that we had trouble adapting to.
In order to truly blend in, it took a change in perspective, a shift in thinking, and a real sense of how different things are in a foreign country. I found myself thinking differently by the end of the trip. I spent a lot of time just trying to absorb and really take in everything I was experiencing. After the first few days I realized that in order to get as much as I could out of this trip, I would have to let go of many of my pre-described notions about how to act and how to think and work on getting into the Japanese mindset. It took a shift in perspective to really appreciate the Japanese culture instead of just passing it off as frustrating or odd. It was only after appreciating and working with the differences that I noticed the similarities, and in the end I found out that we're really not all that different. Japan really wasn't as foreign as I thought.
