Dear Everyone,

Yonemoto-Sensei asked me to write some descriptions of life in Japan for you. My name is Matt Dougherty, I graduated from CU in May of 1999 with a BA in Japanese and East Asian Studies. I studied Japanese at CU for three years before doing a year abroad. I came back and finished out last spring. I was fortunate enough to get a job in the Japan Exchange Teaching (JET) program. JET was created by the Japanese Ministry of Education about 13 years ago to improve English teaching in Japanese schools. There are three types of jobs in JET: Assistant Language Teachers (ALT), Sports Exchange Advisers (SEA), and Coordinator for International Relations (CIR). CIR is the only position where Japanese ability is required. I received a CIR position in May and by June they told me that I had been assigned to Tano-Cho (population 3,800), a rural town in Kochi prefecture, on Shikoku.

What is it like? Well, to start with it's fairly isolated. The nearest big city, Kochi, is two hours away by bus. They are building a train line but it's taken them 23 years to get it this far, hampered by kickbacks, corruption, and maintenance of the completed portions of the track. They do have the tiers up in Tano and they tell me it will be finished in another two years (after I've gone home, natch).

The main road, a two-lane highway, is the main connection to Kochi City. It's sort of like if 36 were cut in half and it ran next to an ocean, if that helps. There are actually not as many accidents as you might think. Those of you who've lived in Japan are probably shocked, and for the uninitiated, the Japanese can be fairly crazy drivers. I am allowed to buy a car and drive, just not to work, since they don't want to be held liable if I take out an old lady or some school kids on the way to the office. Despite the alluring freedom that a owning a car represents, I have held off. It's British driving rules over here, and I'd just as soon not have to worry about it.

The road runs through the middle of town, actually it splits it in two. On the south side are a couple of blocks of shops and houses, then the ocean. On the other side are rice fields, houses, and the mountains. It is very scenic. I live rent-free in a large (by Japanese standards) two floor house. The first week I was here the whole neighborhood was nearly flooded out by a hundred-year rainstorm. A little unsettling, but thankfully the water stopped a couple of inches from my doorstep. A nearby farmer's house on lower ground wasn't so lucky, they got washed out, and could be seen for the next couple of days drying their mats out. The town cancelled its annual Autumn festival in deference to their misfortune.

The first week was a study in contrasts. The JET program has a three-day orientation in a big hotel in Tokyo. I had lived in the big city in Kansai (the Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe area) but was still completely unprepared for the sprawl of Tokyo. Standing at the intersection in front of the JR station at Shinjuku, beneath a mammoth TV screen, the miles of neon, and a few thousand advertisements, thousands of people cross the intersection at one light change. If you wait a few minutes the process repeat, seemingly ad infinitum. I couldn't help but notice the latest in garish fashion: high school girls with a really deep tans, glittering pastel makeup, blonde hair, and boots with 8-10 inch soles. According to TV reports, the dark tan is especially repugnant to older Japanese. You can still see old women working the fields in the summer heat, completely covered head to toe in long sleeves and gloves, lest they get tanned.

In contrast to the madness of the megalopolis is rural Japan. About a third of the population of my little town is over 65. The aging crisis, an explosion in the elderly population and a lack of young people, can be seen here as well. Yes, I do stand out. I'm about 6 feet 3 inches tall with red hair, so the Irish does tend to show. At first people stared a lot, and I once saw a near accident from a driver craning around to get a good look, but I think people have more or less adjusted to me (typed with a grin, I assure you).

The office had me stay at three different homes the first three days. The first night was at my supervisor's place. I was kind of shell-shocked and couldn't keep up with the locals who, with the exception of my supervisor, drink like fish. The next day they told me I would be spending the night at the house of the local priest. Hmm. I had images of a stoic figure, severe brow, polished dome head, wearing a black kimono, sitting in formal style, sipping tea, occasionally uttering a few stern words in extremely polite/old Japanese on the emptiness of life while strains of flute and shamisen filtered through the air. Mori-san greeted me at the door of his place, connected to the temple, with a towel wrapped around his head, grabbed my hand and pulled me inside where his dog, a big oafish spaniel named Pasta, started jumping all over me. As well as being a cycling enthusiast, known to take off for three-day- tours around the area, he's a blues and jazz freak, and has an extremely impressive collection of old records. We spent the first hour or so talking about favorite blues and jazz artists. A few hours and several beers later, he pulled out a guitar and started playing slide guitar blues accompanied by one of his buddies wailing away on the harmonica. That was my second night in town and the first time to meet a Japanese priest. Something tells me they're not all like that.

The third night was at the house of a local bookstore owner. He lives in a big, nice house located across the parking lot from an enormous, modern hot spring. His wife's brother is the owner. They have two sons, 10 and 7 years old. The younger of the two seemed to be acting a little strangely but I assumed he was just put off by the sight of me, big foreigner in his house. A few minutes later the Dad turns to his wife and says explain it to him, whereupon his wife turned to me and said in perfect English, "He's autistic, so sometimes he behaves a little oddly. Please be patient with him." During dinner he ran into the next room, stripped naked, and came running back to the table and continued eating dinner. His parents tried to not act too mortified while very patiently trying to get him to put his clothes back on.

I was a little surprised, actually shocked, and just laughed it off when they apologized, joking that I did the same thing when I was a kid, and that I wasn't autistic. They took me over to the hot spring later on that night. They told me later that they wanted to see if I could handle hanging out nude in the hot spring, since foreigners have a reputation for body shame.

Sounds fairly bizarre, right? I tell you all this to emphasize that while I am living with Japanese, they are just people, each with their own stories, personalities and quirks. Living in the country you get to know people a little better than you do in the city, or at least that's my impression. They also get to know you, your daily habits, movements, and lot of stuff you wouldn't expect them to know. I can make some generalizations about them being Japanese, just not very many.

One of the things that marks them as Kochi people, and still gives me fits, is the local dialect. In Japan, almost every region of the country has its own dialect, and Kochi is no exception. The Kansai dialect is perhaps the most famous and easily recognizable, the Tokyo dialect is perhaps the most standard, and Okinawa dialect is perhaps the most difficult (purely a personal opinion!).

Here they speak Tosa dialect, Tosa being the old name for Kochi. It is really hard to understand with a lot of vocabulary and grammatical patterns that stopped being used everywhere else about 300 years ago. I have an especially hard time understanding the old folks, but they are about as sweet as they could possibly be. My supervisor's speech is close to unintelligible, since he speaks really fast (even for Japanese, they assure me), in Tosa dialect, sometimes with his hand over his mouth. I ask him to slow down, but it's kind of hopeless. When I go back to visit my Japanese family in Kyoto and speak a little Tosa dialect for them, they usually laugh, look befuddled, or tell me I sound like a hick. Usually they do all three. Well, Japanese is a very rich language and what you learn in the States is the standard. When you come here to live you are usually forced to learn at least some regional dialect, sometimes without even being aware of it.

There's much more, but I am going to stop for now. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions or there is something you'd like me to write about.

Yours Truly,

Matt D.

NOTE: Matt's e-mail address is: matthewdougherty@hotmail.com