The One After 2 Years Teaching in Japan

November 2015

My last few months in Japan flew by and before I knew it, I was finally on my way out.

As I looked back on those two years, I’m constantly reminded of how lucky I got with my school, staff, and students.

Despite some difficulties that were just due to my lack of experience in the professional world, I really felt like I won the lottery when it came to the people I worked with.

My last weeks were filled with genuine conversations, invitations to dinners and students’ homes, heartfelt goodbyes, parties, and a flood of gifts and notes of appreciation.

When people ask me about my time there and what I miss, my answer is always the people I worked with and my students.

My old journal entries, on the other hand, were full of bitterness for what I was experiencing outside of work.

Being an Asian American female in Japan just wasn’t easy, and the cultural frustration I felt when seeing the way my non-Asian foreign friends were treated compared to me and the way certain foreigners treated me left me in petty disdain.

In retrospect, I obviously didn’t handle it well.

I knew this was how it would be when I signed my contract.

But there was only so much 22-year-old me could take of hearing non-Japanese people— in Japan— trying to “teach” me about my own culture.

I felt bad about how salty I was at the time about my experience in Japan because everyone was telling me I was so lucky to be where I was and that they wished they were living in Japan.

But all I could think (again, at the time) was, “If you only knew.”

I think over the last 6-7 years of traveling around the world I’ve learned that there is always someone wishing they were you, but that other people’s lives are also not what they seem.

Sure, on social media it looked like I was living the dream, but there were a lot of difficulties, just as much abroad as any other person would have back at home.

Despite it all, I don’t regret my time in Japan at all.

Just like the other places I’d eventually travel to in the years to follow, the positives for me always outweigh the negatives, and the connections I made in those places will always be a priceless, irreplaceable blessing to my life.