I don't have much to talk about right now other than some of the things I miss in Japan that America has plenty of. Don't get me wrong, I love coming to Japan and living here for a while, but if I had to choose between here and America to live, I would definitely choose America. I'm writing this for those people whose dream would be to live in Japan. Let's just assume I was fluent in both Japanese and English, but the reasons why I like America better than Japan are many. Let's start with my biggest complaint about Japan, the lack of air conditioning... It's not even funny how much I've been sweating lately, I've always been a very warm person, but I could always expect to walk into a nice cool house or store to cool off. Japan isn't really the case, very few houses here have central air, and even if they did, they don't turn it on when you want them to. The school is a good example, they have central air but it's just no good at all. The A/C trickles out and you can occasionally feel a small cool breeze. So after I sweat all day at school, take the bus home(which has some good A/C), walk up my mountain and break another sweat, and get home, there's no A/C at all. I sit in front of a fan for about 15 minutes before doing anything else. I can only turn on my joke of an A/C on for a few hours before I go to sleep and then I have to turn it off before hitting the hay.
Now America can be warm sometimes too because we're trying to conserve a little electricity, and that's where the next thing I miss comes in. I miss my car so much, it's my personal audio-playing, stuff-hauling, freezer on wheels. Buses here you have to pay to get anywhere, except my free school bus. To go up my mountain, it costs me 140 yen, which is almost a third of a gallon of gas in America, when driving your own car is so much cheaper in my opinion. The other thing I hate about buses is my tendency to lose things on them, hitting my head on bars and lights, and the fact the schedules are wrong when you really need a bus. Walking everywhere can be healthy, but in this heat I just sweat way too much for me to enjoy any benefits I may or may not be actually getting. Well, enough complaining about the heat, onto the next thing!
The food would be the next thing. I don't have any problems with Japanese food, in fact I like it a lot. It's the things they're missing. Some of the stuff they're missing would be cheap meat and cheese. Japanese cheese is a joke, it tastes like nothing and it's way too soft. The meat is really expensive, buying any kind of beef, even if it's ground beef is extremely expensive. The cheapest meat they got here is pork, and even chicken isn't all that common here. Fish is plentiful and usually a good price, it's also very fresh so that eating it raw is no problem, sashimi is amazing and it's one of the things I'm really going to miss. They don't have gallons of milk, they have it in 1 liter cartons, and it's almost always close to whole milk. I've only found one kind of milk here that tastes like American milk, and the taste of their milk here takes some getting used to. Macaroni and cheese is practically non-existent, and a lot of the things we take for granted like Ranch Dressing, Beef Jerky, and chocolate by the pound can't be found here. Nothing here is really sold in bulk except for rice, and so that means you can't have one bottle of shampoo lasting you for a month, only just a week or two.
Hmmm...the next thing would probably be the job situation. The way you're hired and how you work is so radically different from the United States it's really not worth it to work here unless you want to teach. The only way you can really get hired for a full-time job is straight out of college, changing jobs is really hard and often not worth it, and most wages are seniority and not ability based. So making a decent living of $50,000 a year is nearly impossible coming straight out of college here in Japan. The work hours are long and demanding, and family life often suffers as a result of it. I wrote a 6 page paper on this for business, so explaining it any more than this would be exhausting.
Let's see, probably the last thing would be housing and the way Japanese interact with each other. The housing is often small, and affording a decent house can be difficult. Most houses don't have any form of central A/C or central heating, electricity is expensive and so is phone service. You have to separate all your garbage into one of like 5 or 6 different categories. If you don't, the local neighborhood watch can sometimes track you down and put "social" pressure on you. You're often obligated to do things with the community that you may not want to do or have time for. The Japanese are a very indirect sort of people, they can't always tell you what they want to without being too forward, and that's specifically because if there's direct confrontation, and one of the parties sort of loses out on making a decision, there is a loss of face. The Japanese are a face-saving people and usually try to avoid direct confrontation at all costs. So it can be very frustrating when you want to make a point, but you have to go through all these channels to get something taken care of.
As much as I love Japan for all the awesome things that their shopping has to offer, and as well as their culture. I think one of the things I'm going to miss most is all their festivals and interesting ceremonies. However, I miss my meat-eating, bulk-buying, A/C conditioned, freezer on wheels, cheap cell phone, direct to people life in America. America is truly something to be appreciated, and I don't think I would realize this fact as much if I hadn't lived in Japan for 4 months. I miss you all and I look forward to coming home in 2 and a half weeks, take care everyone!
