What I'm Thankful For This Year

As Thanksgiving grows ever closer, I find myself feeling a little homesick.  This will be the first time in my entire life that I've missed our annual Thanksgiving feast, an event that's been going on since before I was born.  While I will be sorely missing my family, friends and holiday food, I still have a great many things to be thankful for, and I wanted to take a few minutes to go over them all.

I'm thankful for my family, who supported me in my decision to travel to Japan (and soon, to Korea.)  They supported me through many frustrating years of school, unemployment and part-time work as well, with nary a complaint.  None of us have any idea when I'll come back home, but they helped me get out here in so many ways, and continue to help me even now.  They also helped me become the man I am today, a man that I'm happy to be.

I'm thankful for my best friend, Greg, and his wife, Claire.  He's also played a large part in my continuing development to be a better person, notably by helping me break out of the extremely shy shell I was locked in during my early college years.  In addition, we've developed our senses of humor by bouncing off each other and making each other laugh whenever we could.  I'm glad that he connected with someone as special and awesome as Claire, and I'm grateful to both of them for opening their home to me every six months or so (as well as generously paying for the occasional plane ticket) so that we could hang out like old times.  Greg was the one who encouraged me to try out for this job, and I'm happy that he gave me the push to try something new.

I'm thankful for my other best friend, Soee Noh.  We met almost a year ago today in San Francisco on the Sunday after Thanksgiving (November 28th, 2010,) and we've been in almost constant communication since then.  We've supported and encouraged each other through hard times, and given each other strength and advice when we needed it.  We've had a couple plans to see each other fall through this year, but we're finally going to see each other in Seoul after Christmas (December 28 – January 1) for the first time in over a year.  She's the reason I'm planning to teach in Seoul next year, and for my growing interest in Korean culture.  I wouldn't leave Japan after only a year and three months for something small, and I'm happy to count her as one of my closest friends!

I'm thankful for all my other friends in the US, Japan and elsewhere.  I've had a lot of great experiences studying, working and hanging out with you all, and I'm sorry that I haven't done as good a job of keeping in touch as I'd like.  I hope that things are going well for everyone, and that you all have a very happy Thanksgiving!

I'm thankful for my health.  Aside from one major (but relatively manageable) malady, I've never been in better shape, and I haven't been seriously ill since coming here (other than that ear infection, but that wasn't so bad.)  It's telling that my diet actually got slightly less healthy after I came to Japan ;)  On a related note, I'm thankful for having a sound mind, which has allowed me to adapt fairly well to (and become quite comfortable with) a new career and drastically different surroundings.

I'm thankful for said new career, one that I genuinely enjoy and can see myself doing for the foreseeable future – not all of us can say those things about our jobs.  I'm thankful for having great coworkers, who are easy-going and a pleasure to spend time with.  I understand that things weren't always as great in the past, so I'm doubly fortunate that things clicked into place just in time for my arrival.  The students are great, too, of course, and they really are the heart and soul of this endeavor.  Without the enthusiasm and intense desire to learn that our students bring, my work would be empty and dull.  The walls are paper-thin (we hear each other's classes all the time,) but hey, you can't have everything.

I'm thankful for my living situation.  My apartment is small but cozy (a comfortable size for me,) surprisingly cheap and only a 10-minute walk from work.  It's close to the train station, the post office and a wide variety of supermarkets, and I have a small park right outside my balcony that gives me a pleasant view every day.  I'm on the third floor, so I'm above the prying eyes of the people on the street and low enough that earthquakes don't shake my room too much.  I still haven't had anything break during an earthquake yet!  I may not have an elevator, but I get more exercise taking the stairs anyway.  I'm also in a 'mansion' and not an 'apartment' (mansions are smaller, cheaper and have thicker walls, while apartments are larger, more expensive and have paper-thin walls) and live far enough away from the train station that I don't have the egregious noise problems that plague my coworker.  I never hear my neighbors, though for that matter I hardly ever see them either; if it weren't for the cars in the parking lot, I'd swear no one else lived here.

Lastly, I'm thankful for all the things I have seen and can see here in Japan, as well as the great people I've met here.  I haven't taken advantage of my ability to explore as I should be (I have to admit that I'm more of a stay-at-home type, which is ironic given that I moved to a foreign country.)  Still, I've done and seen some amazing things here so far, and I'm looking forward to getting out there again and sharing it all with you!

Thanks for reading, and have a very happy Thanksgiving!

EDIT: I forgot to mention a couple of things I'm thankful for when I posted this earlier this week.  I'm also thankful for having a strong creative drive, which has seen me through one movie script, one long short story, numerous short short stories, and reams of ideas that I haven't gotten around to writing yet.  Whether I'll ever do creative work professionally is still up in the air, but I still enjoy improving my skills at writing and with the English language and sharing my work with everyone.

Finally, I'm thankful for living in a relatively quiet, safe city that suits my temperament well and that doesn't have outrageously bad weather.  It's not quite as close to San Francisco weather as I was led to believe, but it's also not as extreme as other parts of the country.  It also feels very safe; I never would have felt comfortable walking around with $300 in cash in the US, but that's perfectly normal here since Japan is more cash-based.  I don't feel anywhere near as worried that someone will walk off with my stuff if I take my eye off it for a few moments (though I still watch my possessions like a hawk out of habit.)  Oh, and I'm grateful that I've never been a victim of a violent crime in any country :)

Driving Curiosities and Bad Luck Numbers

Aside from the obvious differences in driving practices – namely that the vehicles and roads are the reverse of their American counterparts – there are a few other details I've noticed that I find interesting.  The first is that people almost universally (at least from what I've seen) back into parking spaces and pull out to leave, even when it's incredibly difficult.  In the US, however, most people drive into parking spaces and then back out to leave.  In addition, every car I've driven in beeps when you back up, just like big cargo vehicles in the US.

Because Japan is a relatively small and highly crowded country, almost all of the space in cities and towns is put to some use.  There are often sprawling blocks crisscrossed with narrow streets and alleys, making for large mazes of little shops and restaurants.  Also tucked away in these back alleys are small open-air parking lots.  Because they don't have the space to gate off entrances and exits, they instead put some curious devices on the ground that pop up and prevent you from driving away until you've paid.

In one parking lot parking lot and a couple others I've seen, they spelled out 'four' instead of using the numeral like every other space. I know that four is a bad luck number because it has the same sound as death ('shi',) but I didn't think that included Roman numerals as well.

 

The Japanese commonly say 'yon' instead of 'shi' to avoid this unfortunate homonym.  They treat it very much like how we treat 13, and will often skip floor or room numbers to get around using it.  Hospitals in particular avoid the number 43, as it sounds the same as stillbirth.  Nine also sounds the same as suffering ('ku',) so they generally say 'kyuu' instead.

One last thing that I almost forgot about is the very large space between the crosswalk and where drivers stop.  The length of the gap depends on the road conditions, but it's nothing like what we have back in San Francisco.