I am in Japan. Shock!

I have been living here now for, what is it, two months? March 22, that's the day I arrived. It's been a ride so far.

The biggest shock was that there was no shock. I didn't, and still don't feel out of place. Perhaps that's because I came with ten other people from my school. I was able to ease into it one step at a time. We got on the plane in a group, we left the airport in a group, we rode the train in a group.

Ah, the trains. Had I come alone, I know for sure I would've been lost many times before figuring out the trains, having never ridden anything like it my entire life. These days, it's second nature.

After we all got settled in at the hostel and went through a few days of class and exploring Tokyo, I realized that, yes, it really wasn't so different. As time has gone on, I've noticed more and more of those little differences. Even so, nothing ever shocked me. Maybe I thought it was a little weird, but it just didn't jump out at me like I expected.

The culture shock just wasn't there, really.

Was I missing something? Why did I feel so at home? Me, who has always been a bit of a pansy about going out on my own and just doing shit. I'm not one of those poor saps who thinks to himself, "Maybe I was just meant to be Japanese!" but there's certainly something that feels like home here. I still don't know what it is.

I can barely speak the language (certainly nowhere near fluent). Reading the hundreds, possibly thousands of different kanji I see every day when I recognize, at most, 200 and recall the meaning of, at most, 100 is just an impossibility. The roads are cramped and confusing when they're not large and imposing. One of these days I'll have to take some pictures of the bigger intersections during the busy hours. There are so many people!

Despite all this, I have no problem walking up to some passerby and inquiring, "kore wa doko desu ka?" ("where is this?") while pointing at something on a map I scribbled in haste that morning. Everything I heard about Japanese people before coming here is true -- they're not a very social people out on the street. There's no friendly "hello!" to the stranger walking cheerily in the opposite direction. (Although to be honest, there's not much of that in America, either. More than here, but still not much.) However, also true is that they are nice. If you ask for help, many of them will go out of their way to actually physically lead you to the building, even if it's a few blocks in the opposite direction they were heading. I've never had someone deny helping me, because they were in a hurry or busy with something else. And even if they don't know, they'll often stop someone else and ask them about it.

Maybe it's just that the people are so welcoming, even of the "gaijin" (a shortened form of "gaikokujin," or foreigner) they reportedly hate so much.

The culture shock never hit me. But somehow, I expect it to hit much worse when I get back home to America. Back to a world where people are much more open and yet much less welcoming. Maybe I'm once again overestimating the whole ordeal. Only time will tell.