{"id":291,"date":"2008-09-24T20:32:34","date_gmt":"2008-09-24T20:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=291"},"modified":"2008-09-28T03:38:54","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T03:38:54","slug":"trauma-japanese-expats","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/library\/anecdote-articles\/trauma-japanese-expats\/","title":{"rendered":"Trauma (Japanese expats)"},"content":{"rendered":"
TO-RAMA DO-RAMA <\/span><\/div>\n
Tales of Japanese Trauma in the U.S. <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
(Fall 2007 Issue)<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Sure, we faced some trying moments when we were on the JET Program.\u00a0 But what about Japanese expats living in the U.S.?\u00a0 Surely <\/span>they\u2019ve faced their share of <\/span>to-rama as well.\u00a0 Here are some of their stories. <\/span><\/div>\n

I was an exchange student in Florida at the time and went for dinner at an Outback Steakhouse.\u00a0 When I went to the bathroom, though, I couldn\u2019t tell the difference between the men\u2019s and women\u2019s bathrooms, so I chose what I thought was the right bathroom, went in and fortunately didn\u2019t see anyone else.\u00a0 However, as I was sitting in the stall, I noticed men\u2019s legs going by and I heard men\u2019s voices.\u00a0 I was petrified and didn\u2019t know what to do, so I just sat there frozen for about ten minutes.\u00a0 Finally, I burst through my stall door and just hurried out of the bathroom very embarrassed.
\n-Anonymous <\/span><\/p>\n

About eight years ago, I was walking on Madison and 52nd St. on a Sunday afternoon and some kind of animal fell down from the sky, seemingly from the middle of nowhere, and almost hit me.\u00a0 I heard the sounds of the dead animal on the ground, and it looked like a white rat, but of course there is no white rat, so maybe it was just a rat or mouse or white rabbit or some other kind of animal.\u00a0 I saw some blood and body fluid on the ground which made me feel really sick and scared, so I did not really look closely and left.\u00a0 There was no one walking around me, so I am not sure if anyone saw this.\u00a0 However, I was walking around the business district, so there is no way someone dropped the animal from the building… Plus, it was Sunday… And I noticed that there was some blood and body fluid on my pants that I was wearing, so it really shows me how close I was to getting hit by this animal!\u00a0 Ever since then, I am so scared to walk in the Madison and 52nd St. area and always looking up to make sure that nothing is falling from the sky.
\n-Anonymous <\/span><\/p>\n

Seventy-two hours after my company transferred me from Tokyo to New York, I found myself abandoned in New Jersey, in an office full of strangers, and no idea of how to return to New York.\u00a0 My supervisor had taken me to the New Jersey office. We were planning to return together so I paid scant attention to buses, directions, turns, etc., just trailing along after my my supervisor without even purchasing a return ticket.\u00a0 After we arrived at the New Jersey office, however, my supervisor experienced a dramatic change of mood and abruptly declared that she was returning to New York, and then did so by herself.<\/p>\n

Later, as the time came for me to leave the office, no one in the office seemed willing or able to offer any help I asked repeatedly in the office for directions for returning to the city.\u00a0 No one seemed to know or be willing to help.\u00a0 Eventually, I gave up and went outside — it was pouring rain, of course — and I resorted to asking strangers for directions to the bus to New York.\u00a0 After a long walk, I found my way to a bus stop, but not before my shoes were ruined and my feet were literally bleeding.\u00a0 Of course, I was not sure which bus went to Port Authority.<\/p>\n

A bus eventually stopped. The driver, a large and impatient woman, seemed to ignore my question about where the bus went.\u00a0 Eventually, I just got on.\u00a0 At least it was out of the rain.\u00a0 There were only three other passengers on the bus.\u00a0 The George Washington Bridge was a giant traffic jam, and the driver began to violently curse and swear at the traffic in general and the surrounding vehicles in particular.\u00a0 I was terrified. Japanese bus drivers would never react that way.\u00a0 Was this rude, angry woman crazy?<\/p>\n

Eventually, I made it back to Port Authority.\u00a0 Still not home though.\u00a0 I needed to take the subway back to my office.\u00a0 Three days into my tenure in New York, the subways were a mystery.\u00a0 I wandered into a McDonald\u2019s and asked people for directions but no one seemed willing to help.\u00a0 Eventually, I gave up and wandered back outside, found a subway map and worked out the trains myself.<\/p>\n

I still had not learned my lesson about asking strangers for help, though.\u00a0 I got on a subway.\u00a0 When I asked a fellow passenger what station I should exit at, he asked where I wanted to go.\u00a0 \u201cGrand Central,\u201d I replied.\u00a0 \u201cOh, get off here.\u201d\u00a0 We both scrambled out the open door, and then he quickly disappeared up the stairs.\u00a0 Locating another map, I learned that this was not the right station at all.\u00a0 I settled in to wait for the next train.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I managed to get back to a familiar station near my office.\u00a0 Exhausted, I clutched the handrail as I rode the escalator up.\u00a0 At the top, I discovered my hand was covered in black dust.\u00a0\u00a0 Life in America might just prove too much, I thought as I stood there still wet, with ruined shoes, bloody feet and blackened hands, reflecting on the consistently unhelpful people I had encountered all day.\u00a0 Even today, after seven years in New York, I can barely stand to be in the vicinity of the Port Authority.
\n-Mari <\/span><\/p>\n

Immigration in this country bites, as everyone knows.\u00a0 Being a foreigner, I have to go by the book. I don\u2019t take any chances when it comes to immigration law, since I am such a chicken.\u00a0 As you may know, when you are about to graduate from university, your visa needs to be switched from student status to a temporary working permit.\u00a0 During this time, you can\u2019t leave the U.S. until the new visa arrives.\u00a0 It was 1999, a week before Thanksgiving, when I sent my application to the INS, and called my mother.\u00a0 I told her that I couldn\u2019t leave the country for a while, and she said everyone was fine, and nothing to worry about.\u00a0 A day after Thanksgiving, still munching on leftover turkey, I got a call.\u00a0 It was my brother.\u00a0 He never calls me.\u00a0 He said \u201cDon\u2019t be surprised.\u201d\u00a0 I was like, \u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d and he kept saying not to be surprised.\u00a0 I was almost getting excited, thinking, is he getting married?\u00a0 Did someone win the lottery?!\u00a0 Then he quietly said \u201cYour father passed away.\u201d\u00a0 I didn\u2019t believe him, and I kept asking what the real surprise was.\u00a0 Finally my mom came to the phone, and told me it was true.\u00a0 Disbelief.\u00a0 Of course I told mother that I couldn\u2019t go home a week earlier, so I was like, \u201cWHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?\u201d, sobbing.\u00a0 She said not to worry about it since there was not much anyone could do at that moment.\u00a0 Even if I tried, by the time I got back home, it would have been after the funeral was over.\u00a0 It was the most traumatic moment of my life, yet, such a hard-core realization moment.\u00a0 I was just studying abroad, 10,000 miles away from home, but never thought about this type of serious thing happening to anyone at home.\u00a0 It made me rethink the whole reason of me being in America, the land of opportunity.\u00a0 I thought about going back to Japan, but I remembered how my father was the most supportive when I said I wanted to go study abroad, so I stayed.\u00a0 When I went home in March of 2000, it was so odd.\u00a0 The only thing visible was his picture and a butsudan<\/span>.\u00a0 Since my father had been in and out of the hospital, I felt like he was still in the hospital.\u00a0 It\u2019s been seven years since, but I sometimes still have to tell myself \u201cMy father is dead.\u201d
\n-Anonymous <\/span><\/p>\n

When I first arrived in the U.S. in 1991, I got in to JFK Airport with my two friends, all of us female.\u00a0 As we started to figure out transportation from the airport, a man just took our suitcases and started putting them in his car.\u00a0 It turned out he had a big stretch limousine.\u00a0 I was getting a bad vibe, but we asked him “How much?” and he said $35.\u00a0 So we got in, and he took us to our hotel in Manhattan.\u00a0\u00a0 When we got out, he started saying it was $35 “per person.”\u00a0 But I didn’t know what “PAH–pasun” meant.\u00a0 So I kept saying I didn’t understand and he kept saying “PAH-pasun.”\u00a0 Finally I figured it out and we gave him $35 per person.\u00a0 Then he complained we have to give him a tip, and I was so scared I gave him $20.\u00a0 Afterwards I told my friend who lives in New York.\u00a0 She was so mad and said I shouldn’t have paid the driver that much.
\n-Hiromi <\/span><\/p>\n

A few years ago when I was living in Southern California, my friends and I rented a car to drive from Oxnard, where I was living at the time, to Santa Barbara.\u00a0 I was still new to living in the U.S., and while I experienced many culture shocks while getting used to my new life here, I was still confident of my driving abilities.<\/p>\n

We got on the 101 and my two friends took an afternoon nap as we began the hour-plus journey.\u00a0 I was comfortable behind the wheel \u2014 maybe too comfortable.\u00a0 After some time, I noticed another car that appeared to be coming straight at us!\u00a0 This was strange, and I thought maybe the driver was lost or something.\u00a0 Staying in place, I continued to drive even though the car was still speeding towards me!<\/p>\n

The car moved closer and closer, and we were doing at least 50 MPH.\u00a0 I thought about what was going on when the other driver suddenly blared its horn, waking my friend who was sitting next to me.\u00a0 In a flash, she saw what was happening and screamed at the top of her lungs, grabbing the wheel and turning it hard.\u00a0 We just missed the the other driver, who sped away without even slowing down.\u00a0 It wasn’t until I looked at the road again that I realized what happened — I somehow drifted all the way to the left side of the road!\u00a0 And here I thought that I had finally gotten used to driving on the right!\u00a0 Fortunately, nobody was hurt and we safely arrived at our destination.\u00a0 This story might seem more accidental than traumatic, but the sad thing is that during the rest of my time in California, the same thing happened two more times — with the same friend in the passenger seat!\u00a0 Now I stick to riding the subway, but I still enjoy driving in America!
\n-Aya Shimizu <\/span><\/p>\n

f you have ever ridden a subway in Tokyo during rush hour, you know about the subway employees responsible for pushing people into the trains.\u00a0 I was born and raised in Tokyo, so, I have successfully learned how to get myself into the train and to get comfortable most of the time without getting into a fight in Tokyo.\u00a0\u00a0 However, on the first day to work in NY, I did what I used do to in Tokyo.\u00a0 Haha…\u00a0\u00a0 A big and tall woman pushed me out of the train with her hips saying “What the hell you think you are doing.\u00a0 No more space for you!”\u00a0 When I arrived in NY four years ago, the complexity of the MTA subway map did not intimidate me \u2014 until I started riding the subway myself!\u00a0\u00a0 For my first job interview in NY, I had to call the interviewers twice to let them know that I was coming late since the train was delayed, since I could not hear or understand the announcement telling that the train was going express, etc.\u00a0 On my third call to them, I apologied for the inconvenice, explaining that I did not think I would be able to get to their office in the near future, and thanked them for contacting me for the interview.\u00a0 I was not cyring.\u00a0 But, when they told me that they went through the same expreience and said, “We will be here and wait for you,” I started cying.\u00a0 As you know, this would not have happened in Japan, but only in NY.
\n-Emiko <\/span><\/p>\n

The first year I came to the U.S. I was in a dormitory room with some friends watching TV.\u00a0 I wanted to switch channels, so I said to everybody, “Where is limo-con?”\u00a0 Everybody was like “???”\u00a0 I realized I pronounced it wrong, so I said it again, “Where is rimo-con?\u201d\u00a0 Everybody was still like, “???”\u00a0 I thought my “r” pronunciation was pretty bad, so I said, “RRRRimo-con?”\u00a0 After a while, somebody said “You mean remote control?”\u00a0\u00a0 I was sooooo embarrassed!\u00a0 But we call it “limo-con” in Japan!
\n-Noriko <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TO-RAMA DO-RAMA Tales of Japanese Trauma in the U.S. (Fall 2007 Issue) Sure, we faced some trying moments when we were on the JET Program.\u00a0 But what about Japanese expats living in the U.S.?\u00a0 Surely they\u2019ve faced their share of to-rama as well.\u00a0 Here are some of their stories. I was an exchange student in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":70,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-291","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PkZ7m-4H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":578,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/291\/revisions\/578"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}