Culture Shock

things I expected and then didn't

The JAL flight, nonstop from LGA to NRT, landed late in the afternoon on July 31st, 1988, Japan time. The flight had been long. I had not slept. I jostled in my seat, impatient.

The pilot spoke. We apologize for the delay. All gates are currently full. The tower has asked us to park on the tarmac. We’ll be in position shortly and buses will ferry you to the terminal.

I sighed, glaring once more at the fasten-seat-belts light.

Twenty minutes later, the crew opened both the front and aft doors, and an embrace of moist air rushed through the cabin. Sweat immediately beaded on my brow, and as I inhaled the air of my new home, I took note of different odors. New York had humidity, but this combination of water vapor and a faintly tropical, somewhat putrescent scent was unexpected.

Was this culture shock?

College professors and consular officials alike foretold that Japan would delight me, certainly, but also surprise and confound me. And yet I wondered when the phenomenon they called culture shock would begin.

Exhausted, I followed the other passengers on to the sleek orange buses, still managing to marvel as each bus stopped and then lowered itself to make entrances and exits easier.

Exhausted, I wended my way through immigration and customs, yet smiling to see that my Japanese language skills were comprehensible to people other than teachers and classmates.

Exhausted, I watched as my luggage was fed into the belly of something called a limousine bus and someone encouraged me to board it. My head rested against a curtained window therein and I slept, fitfully, until we arrived at the Keiō Plaza Hotel, snug within the neon-bedecked futurism that is Shinjuku.

When jet lag awoke me at three the next morning, I again wondered: Is this culture shock?

My stay at the Keiō Plaza was for an orientation program. Everyone arriving in Japan that weekend to take up work for the second year of the Japan Exchange & Teaching Programme (I was about to start teaching English in a small high school in the Tōkyō suburbs) got four days of speeches, receptions, and small-session presentations. The content passed through my brain as a blur, but some information garnered attention.

I smiled to see that there were support groups for women and for Black people on the program. But then I wondered why there were none for gay people. Out of the closet for just over a year at that point, and suffused with white-male-confidence, I approached a program organizer, a woman named Roberta that I remembered from the limousine bus ride.

Her response, even though I anticipated it, devastated me. Japan doesn’t look kindly on homosexuals, and you would risk being fired if anyone on a local PTA found out you were gay.

Was that culture shock? No. Life wasn’t much better back in the United States. The vitriol directed against gay men during the early years of the HIV-AIDS pandemic was one of the reasons I left for Japan.

Was it culture shock when I was homestays? When students and strangers alike came within inches to shout a Japanese-inflected hello? Harō! When my teaching colleagues shared their awful cigarettes, with brand names like Hope and Peace? No, no, no.

Age 22, Okegawa Senior High School, October of 1988, looking like, as one of my teaching colleagues noted, the composer Robert Schumann.

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Culture shock came early in November. I had finally convinced my supervisor to let me live on my own, and had just moved into a brand-new apartment close to the train station. With freedom came silence. And with silence came a deeper understanding of the loneliness my Japanese closet seemed to require.

That isolation did not last long, however. At a mid-November conference for local program participants (officially designed to refresh teaching skills but likely scheduled to reconnect those of us working in places with no other commiserating foreigners around with other Americans, Australians, Canadians, Brits, Irish, and New Zealanders), I met another gay person. A tall, blond, Virginia Slims (menthol!) addict named Cameron.

Cameron in 1989.

Cameron had spent his junior year in Tōkyō and from the moment he met he had the 411 I needed. Gay bookstores? Yes. Bars? Yes. Bathhouses? Yes. And most importantly, gay social groups? Yes.

I joined him at a meeting of International Friends in December and began the dating odyssey I describe in great detail within Crying in a Foreign Language: The Deity That Answered My Plea.

My escape from culture shock was temporary, and I learned it was a cyclical occurrence with ever-diminishing peaks of excitement and troughs of confusion. But I now had a toehold on the Japan I wanted to be part of. Gay Japan. And better yet, gay Japan soon had a toehold on me.

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Every year, I buy a Japanese calendar that combines two things I love: floriography (the meaning behind different flower gifts) and four-character epigrams, known as 四字熟語 (yoji jukugo). I looked at today’s entry as I started writing this issue.

Forget-me-nots (Myosotis spp.) are a wonderful gift anyone writing memoir.

And then there is the splendiferous epigram: 魑魅魍魎 (chimimōryō). First of all, I love that all four characters incorporate the 鬼 (oni, demon) character. It refers to the fantastical, the bizarre, the strange, and how appropriate for my memories of culture shock.

March 13th marks the beginning of Vernal Equinox ceremonies on the Japanese calendars. Spring, spring, spring!