I have always contended that the first six months you spend in Japan are your honeymoon period. The marriage period starts soon after, and your marriage with Japan may only last only a year or two, depending on the terms of your visa – and how much patience you can muster.

Before arriving in Japan, I remember reading an interesting article by a woman who had spent a few years in Tokyo. She advised everyone who planned to live in Japan to make a list of all the images and opinions they had about the country and the people, and then after six months or so, to go back and write another list based on the experiences they had amassed. The idea was that after six months, you could compare the reality of what you’d found to your pre-Japan fantasized ideal. The woman herself wasn’t giving anything away: she kept her experiences and images of Japan to herself. ‘When you compare your two lists,’ she wrote, ‘you’ll be amazed at how your impressions have changed.’  I have often thought that she showed remarkable restraint. After one year in Japan, I was itching to tell everybody around me about my own lists. 

As with all stereotypes, there was a grain of truth that remained once I had winnowed out the chaff as I compared my two lists.  The notion of politeness was the first to bite the dust. Yes, Japanese people were polite, but in a ritualized way that didn’t always translate into across-the-board polite behavior from a western perspective. And politeness, I found, was usually reserved for your in-group rather than wasted on the people you did not know. This was brought home to me the fourth day I was in Japan, when I went on a job interview. The school was tiny, with only two teachers, and my prospective boss came to collect me at the station himself. He was obsequiously polite to me, but I was amazed to see that after ushering me into the office building that housed his conversation school, he let the door slam shut behind him in the face of a woman struggling to cope with a toddler and a stroller. I turned back to help her, and the man looked astounded. Why hold the door open for her? he seemed to be thinking –  was it possible that I knew the woman?

Aesthetic beauty was next. Yes, the Japanese had a highly developed sense of aesthetics, but this did not mean that you could see that beauty everywhere. I had pictured rows and rows of quaint little Japanese houses with pretty little gardens filled with bonsai trees and artfully trained pines, decorative ponds alive with carp. What I found instead was dark and narrow warrens filled with cramped-looking wooden houses blackened by the soot of decades, standing cheek-by-jowl with greengrocers, real estate offices and dry cleaners shops, all within a stone’s throw of glittering modern buildings, corporate headquarters with sheer expanses of glass and steel.

It was bizarre to walk along sidewalks past towering skyscrapers with their slick modern sculptures and professionally landscaped gardens, then around the corner into a neighborhood of shabby wooden houses where children commuted to and from school down narrow streets without sidewalks, where washing hung from kitchen windows and morning glories grew in grubby pots. That said, beauty, when you found it, was generally so totally unexpected that it took your breath away:  a small flawlessly-manicured garden tucked away behind a huge grey ferroconcrete hotel; an exquisite little shrine nestled among trees, a young woman wearing a purple-and-green kimono with a bright yellow obi.  No matter what I found, though, and no matter how my impressions of Japan inevitably changed, I relished the experiences I had – and the chance to make up my own mind.

After seventeen years in Japan, I have seen a lot of people go through this honeymoon stage, greatly revising their lists along the way. For most people newly arrived in Japan, everything is great. The people are so polite and everything is so quaint, so different. The food’s good, the restaurants are affordable, the trains and buses run on time, the streets are largely clean, and you can walk around at night in reasonable safety most of the time. As a general rule, the warts start showing sometime after that first six months.

One of the first words every non-Asian person in Japan learns is gaijin. This means ‘foreigner’ and it is usually reserved for Caucasians, but can also be applied to dark-skinned people and Asian-Americans. The more polite term is gaikokujin, or ‘foreign country person,’ but this is generally shortened to gaijin.  This term ranges from the mildly inoffensive (‘Oh, look, Mama, there’s a gaijin!’) to the highly offensive ‘Hey, you gaijin!’), but no matter how it is used, it is a term you quickly get tired of hearing.

A gaijin is a gaijin. There is no distinction made between the fellow who is fresh off the boat and cannot understand a word of Japanese and the missionary who has spent over forty years in the country and translated The Tale of Genji into Lithuanian. If you look foreign, you’re a gaijin pure and simple, and you’re going to hear this term. The longer you live in Japan, the more you are going to hear it.  At first it is just another novelty; you walk down a street and realize that half a dozen teenagers are cat-calling you, but what do you care?   So that group of kids called you gaijin, so what? After all, you are a gaijin!  After you’ve spent a little time in Japan, however, your patience wears thin. Okay, so you’re a gaijin. You still don’t want this term following you from the supermarket to the Laundromat. You don’t want it creeping up behind you when you're on the way to the pharmacist's with a streaming cold, tormenting you in the rain as you struggle to repair your bicycle chain, or whispering into your ear as you’re fumbling for your ticket at the station. Marjorie and Todd had both spent a few years in Japan and thus were well out of the honeymoon period. There were good and sick of being called gaijin – and a lot of other things too – and like all long-term foreigners in any country, they tended to bitch about it.  A lot.

I was fresh off the boat, but I had already worked in a Japanese environment. Moreover, even though the other teachers had all been in Japan longer than I had, my Japanese was superior to theirs – I had even begun to read and write. I knew that the others had more experience living in Japan, but I found their non-stop whining about the meanness and insularity of the Japanese irritating.  Although Marjorie largely excluded me from their conversations, she and Todd were at pains to explain to me why Japan was a thoroughly messed up country.

'You can't get decent interest on the money you put in your savings account,' Todd would say in disgust.  At that time I hardly ever worried about how much money I had as long as I had enough to eat and pay the rent, so this didn't really bother me. Besides, I was quick to point out, neither Todd nor I, inexperienced teachers without proper qualifications, could easily have gotten jobs teaching English in America, so it was a little greedy to gripe that our easily-gotten money did not earn top interest rates.

When I said this, however, Todd threw his hands up in exasperation.  'You're missing the point, Mary.'  He would never admit that we were fortunate to have our jobs. Todd seemed to feel that Japan owed everybody -- especially him -- the best wages, housing, and other amenities. When conditions did not live up to his high expectations, he immediately pulled out his American yardstick and found Japan wanting.

Japanese men treated their women badly, Todd maintained. I found this amazing, coming from a person who discussed and criticized women's appearances ad nauseam, who seemed to scorn women for various flaws he himself possessed in abundance. The only time Todd got anywhere near taking a feminist stance was when he considered Japanese men and their dealings with Japanese women.

Todd didn't have much time for feminists, he had told me. He had heard in the news that a prominent feminist had likened having a baby to having a large bowel movement. This filled him with rage.

'Having a baby is a sacrament! How could anyone possibly compare a baby and a shit?'

A good friend of mine in the States had just been through a two-day labor, and I couldn't help myself. 'Todd, the woman wasn't comparing a baby to a bowel movement. She was comparing the birthing process to painful defecation. That's entirely different.'

'I don't care. What she said was disgusting and insulting to every mother.'

'Well, pardon me, but you're a man. You're never going to give birth, Todd. The woman who made the comparison actually had a baby, and she's entitled to her impressions.'

Todd couldn't see this, though, and it was pointless to try and make him. Arguing with Todd was an exercise in futility.

I lost track of all the things that Marjorie and Todd hated about Japan. Being called gaijin. The silliness of Japanese girls. The narrowness of Japanese roads.  Japanese drivers. The fact that Japanese houses were built differently.

'It's ridiculous!' Todd would fume. 'They do everything backwards!'  Todd had family members who were in construction. He knew how it was done, and it was done all wrong in Japan.

I can never leave foolish disagreements like this alone. Could it not be that the Japanese thought the same thing when they saw how we built houses, I would argue.

Marjorie seldom joined the arguments other than to put in the odd patronizing word.

I found their attempts to turn me, as it were, exasperating. I wanted to be able to form my own opinions. I also wondered how they could criticize so much about Japan and the Japanese without the benefit of knowing the language any better than they did. Even now, a veteran of seventeen years in Japan, with reasonable fluency in the language and a thousand gripes of my own, I look back on that period and find their attitude exasperating. I don’t blame them for complaining: living in a foreign country has its frustrations and anyone ought to feel free to complain; it helps you let off steam. What I mind is the fact that they looked down on me for not immediately accepting their arguments. It was as though they wanted me to swallow whole the opinions about Japan they had formed over the course of years, without even acknowledging that I might know a few things they didn't.  They wanted me to write my second list when I had only spent a few weeks in Japan.

I was on my honeymoon, damn it. I had a right to a few illusions.