My supervisor these days can’t be seen without clutching his gospel of multilingual communication, all in Japanese bar the title: ‘Toss’. It doesn’t come much more accurate if Japanese English textbooks are anything to go by.

So all has been quiet of late; sorry to those of you looking to kill time at work!

 Jess, my sempai and comrade in Hikari, recently remarked that while we in the US/UK occasionally put up with the cold when absolutely necessary, the Japanese live in it. And she’s right. My Japanese teacher wanted to have a party, but has postponed until March because it’s too chilly.

Life being thus, one is principally concerned by keeping warm, and thoughts of adventures tend to be trumped by the prospect of a nice warm bed. Yet such quiet times have allowed me to concetrate on work alot more, and have born some happy fruits in the process. While my return to Japan was followed by one of my bleaker fortnights, it seems a trust has taken root between me and my teachers, resulting in greater companionship between me and my students.

I ran some classes today which reminded me of what a topsy-turvy world Japan is to us gaikokujin. I brought some newspapers and magazines back from the UK and challenged my Year 8s to a bit of detective work.

Obstacle 1: Where’s the front cover? Our front is their back, and vice versa, resulting in some very puzzled faces when all my first question asked for was the price.

Obstacle 2: Where’s Israel? Moreover, what is Israel? They still don’t really know.

Obstacle 3: It’s not just the English textbooks, then, that insist on everything being written left to right, but everything the Anglophonics read - all literature in Japan is printed vertically.

Obstacle 4: Why aren’t these comics manga?

Obstacle 5: Not recognising Nicholas Sarkozy is fair game. Neither did their teacher. This is also fair game, as I couldn’t put a name to any leaders of South Korea, or Japan had I not live here for while. Yet for a moment I was ashamedly startled.

Obtacle 6: My personal favourite. What on earth is a badger? Even upon translation (’holebear’ in Japanese) both students and teacher remained perplexed, and my teacher concluded one could only be seen in a zoo.

These observations are not criticisms of my students or my teacher, but rather highlight for a second some of the things I take so very much for granted and make me realise that we are phenomenally different, and that’s great. For some time I have been frustrated by the knowledge that no matter how hard I try, I’ll never truly fit in. Yet today I loved being different; for the first time it wasn’t the rudimentary ‘look at the foreigner’ routine, but rather giving the kids a small insight into what we watch, read and pore over (the mags ranged from local rag to Newsweek to Marie Claire to Spiderman to Bratz, which for the record is the spawn of Satan).

It would be nice to think I could do the same with Japanese newspapers and mags, but it’ll be a long time before my kanji makes the grade. Maybe I could start with some kiddy comics and really give my students something to talk about.

I had never intended to write anything up regarding my trip back to England this Christmas, but as my good friend Louise has told me she is awaiting reading material I guess I should deliver something. It was an assault upon the brain and body, but also a journey well worth making - the most that Fran and I were apart for the entire 2 weeks was a couple of hours at my parents’ where he worked and I chatted. For now, here’s some idle scribble used to pass 1 of the 8 hours I had to spend in Bangkok on my way to London. More may follow, it may not. It depends if the cocktail of jetlag and festive residue kill me first.

 ’So the transition has commenced. I never anticipated it feeling quite so transitory, as having been away only 5 months and with gaijin most weekends, planting myself back into western culture didn’t seem that big a deal. Which it isn’t…yet.

As I sit here trying to pass the first of 8 hours at Bangkok International Airport, supping on an ice-cold Heineken and nibbling on a nice warm sausage roll, the grace and reserve of Japan is already beginning to come in to focus.

Airports are strange places at the best of times. Overheated and synthetic, the concoction of coffee, perfume and plastic is at first a rather exciting aroma, until it gets replaced by the smell of frustration and farts. Right now, however, Bangkok is as airy as airports get, and is providing me with the perfect opportunity to get all the staring at people who are Not Japanese out of the way before ending up looking like a real weirdo in London.

I always understood logically why the Japanese stare so much. As gaijins in Yamaguchi, we look very different and there are very few of us. I’d stare at a leopard if I saw one in Belper. Or Manchester for that matter. But lordy, we are an odd-looking bunch, and I must confess some of us do veer on the side of monstrous in appearance (I think particularly here of the more-than-portly Australians I have just sympathised with on the beer-hunt - for some reason there is a limited supply of liquor in Thailand on election day). A particularly non-monstrous family has just wandered by, however, and the baby’s sky-blue eyes remind me of why so many Japanese people think we’re ‘cute’.

Looking at all these care-free and sunkissed youths reminds me of Sri Lanka, while I sit here looking pasty in my varyingly earnest shades of charcoal, having ditched the rollneck (also charcoal) and the legwarmers when I realised how close the the equator we actually are. Now there’s some bonkers tenses.  So many of these people look so young, and while most of them are probably around the 19 mark and thus only a few years my junior, I feel like they have so much to live through before they get to the sage-like figure of 23.  I have no doubt, either, that Japan has aged me. Not in these sense that it has made me any wiser, but that it has exposed me to things which call into question the excited ideals of young adulthood. 

Japan’s also exposed me, in no uncertain terms, to Better Ways of Living. I use the plural because the Japanese have not mastered a singularly ‘better’ way of living, however you measure quality of life. But the breed of collectivist psychology that exists there, at least in my brief experience of it, has shown me just how much people can achieve when it is necessary for them to plough all their energies into any task they undertake for the sake of the group. It doesn’t denigrate the accomplishments of the individual. If anything, it heightens them, and I think I’ve seen that from the students’ performance at sports’ festival to even doing karaoke with the staff. Individual fear of embarrassment = not singing. But doing it to keep the party alive for everyone else means practice, which puts the Japanese much more firmly on the road to perfect. 

Isn’t it interesting that having inwardly bemoaned the Japanese superiority complex for some time now, I feel I am somehow superior to all the outwardly generic backpackers here by being the Girl Who Lives in Japan. Now there’s a mind-bend I wasn’t expecting! I could do with Kieran to talk to right now.

Thai sounds like Jamaican Chinese. Another adorable blue-eyed child. Why do the caucasians age so?

20 hours and I’m back with Fran. That shouldn’t seem so long, should it? I’ve more to say on that, but it’s time for me to pop for a wee and to sniff out another place that’ll serve me beer.’