Culture shock
Dealing with Culture Shock
Culture Shock is an oft-touted phenomenon that gives new JETs actual scientific reasoning for any glimmer of emotional change they experience during adjustment to their new host country. Almost everything can and will be attributed to culture shock. Feeling happy? That’s culture shock. Feeling sad? Culture shock. Fridge light is broken? Culture shock. And so on in that fashion. Problems arise from culture shock when people are unprepared for it. I’m not very good with estimates, but I would guess that nearly 17 billion people die from culture shock each year.
In a kind of audacious, overly simple manner, culture shock has been watered down to the extent whereby it is now characterised by a simple graph. The generally accepted skew of a culture shock function is a sharp rise, followed by a slow steady fall. This depicts an individual’s initial fascination and enthusiasm for a new host country, followed by a constant, abhorrent hatred for anything to do with it, building up over time like a big shit. I feel this is an insufficient allegory by which to pigeonhole the human mind, so with my “Pop-up book of Doctorologyism” under my arm, I set out to explore the possibility of a different graph to represent the impact of culture shock. I now share with you my findings.
To make the concept of culture shock easier to understand, I have separated the main stages of culture shock in Japan into 4 easily distinguishable states of being.
1) The “whoah” stage This is the stage experienced during the early phase of cultural adjustment. You shower praise upon everything and anything for being so remarkably Japanese. Trying out what little of the language you learnt is fun and rewarding. You love to watch the zany antics of the silly Japanese people on the TV. You bore your friends back home with enthusiastic tales of strange, new drinking holes and the feisty locals. At school you sit in an ivory tower, smoking a big fat cigar, wearing diamond shoes, surrounded by all the gold you can eat. Everyone wants to talk to the new gaijin. Green Tea is poured for you throughout the day. Concubines are brought out after lunch. And you can smoke in the staffroom.
2) The “I miss everything” stage A few months into cultural adjustment you may experience a period of yearning for home and paraphernalia associated with home. As your home country vies for attention once more, subconsciously you start to reject Japan. You place a hand on your heart every time you see the postcards of the Queen you brought to Japan to show everyone. Sometimes you even feel an odd sexual excitement whilst looking at them. You cocoon yourself in an English-language bubble, watching ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’ videos with religious frequency as Japanese TV has long since become too irritating and repetitive to bear. You visit foreign food restaurants, savouring every last morsel of non-Japanese cuisine. Your emails to friends back home become more numerous, disjointed and maniacal as your craving for contact from home forces you to email regardless of whether there is anything of consequence to say. In social situations with Japanese people, you decide that they will understand your English if you simply speak louder and more angrily, whilst rebuffing any response to you that isn’t in grammatically perfect English.
3) The “everything is wank” stage Continuing along the downward spiral, you enter the stage where everything is wank. By now it has sunk in that a job is a job, and you are actually working quite hard - the rub being that you are working quite hard in a country where no one understands you. Your non-achievement of even a semblance of fluency with the Japanese language has left you jaded and contemptible. You scoff at the cuisine of the foreign food restaurants you once cherished, harking rhetoric about how “its not the same as home”. You choose to only socialise with gaijin friends, but secretly the only person you like is yourself.
4) The ‘I am the antijapan’ stage All the suppressed emotions that have built up over time as a consequence of you not being able to express yourself has now created a dark core of pure evil inside you. If a kid kancho’s you at hoikuen, you kancho every single kid back, then move onto the other teachers. In your k-car, you derive great enjoyment from smashing straight into old ladies driving their motorized shopping trolleys now, instead of giving them a wide berth like before. At temples you steal all the food offerings, then climb on the bell rope whilst making tarzan sounds and swearing at the monks in bad Japanese.
Taking all this into account, I have devised a graph which I feel is approximately 7 times more effective at showing the effects of culture shock. Look and learn.
