Well, it’s been a long summer, but finally my semester abroad is here. I’m writing from the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport, waiting for my flight to Tokyo to begin boarding. Although part of me was just procrastinating, I think I made a good decision in waiting until the last minute to write my pre-departure blog post. Even after getting my visa, booking my flight, and starting to pack, the idea of going to Japan for 4 months still seemed like a far-off adventure that would never come. But now here I am, and my adventure could not be more real.
I thought it was cool that the pre-departure blog post had to be about identities, because that is one of the major reasons why I chose to spend my semester abroad in Japan. I wanted to use the opportunity I was given to study in another country to see a culture and people extremely different than what I’ve experienced my whole life. I think its important to see and embrace other cultures and their values and practices. I think change is important, especially at this point in life. Right now, with all the time and opportunity I have to explore and try new things, I believe that immersing myself in something new and taking a sort of “leap of faith” will be extremely rewarding. That’s why I think I’d value change over tradition: change helps us learn to adapt and accept new things and people. I definitely don’t think tradition should be completely thrown out of the window, but it should be willing and able to adapt to new people, values, circumstances, etc.
I knew going to a completely new place like Japan would offer an opportunity to discover a whole new culture, but also discover something about myself. Japanese culture has so many different values and practices than American and even European culture, and I love the idea of seeing a culture so different. Who knows, I may find that I value similar things, or that I should or want to value different things. By exposing myself to another culture, I hope to find new perspectives on life, and even just new ways to do things or new activities to try. Because culture is such a completely different outlook on life, I think cultures definitely affect how we experience things around us. That’s another reason why I think this is such an awesome opportunity. By learning about and experiencing another culture, I get to see a whole new way to experience everyday life and look at the things that happen. I hope to also have the same impact on the people that I interact with, however small that impact may be.
It will be interesting to see how Americans are viewed by Japanese people, and how they react to some things that I may do differently at first or have to get used to. It’s amazing that culture can change even how we do small everyday tasks. I think that by sharing my culture with the people I meet and learning about their culture in turn will help all of us gain an understanding of why people do things so differently or have such different values.
