Tanaka & Green Scholarship Essay – Connor Iorio

I’m sitting in the heated waiting room on a train platform in Aomori city. Across from me an older woman types away at her phone, glancing up at me. A few minutes later she comes up to me with google translate pulled up. “Don’t cry. Have you never cried before?” The messy translation makes me laugh. A few months later I’m on a bus in northern Hokkaido, the bus is crowded, and every seat is full. The woman sitting next to me asks why I am here. After a bit of sloppy conversation, I learn she lived in the same town as my host city when she was my age. In May, I sat in a tiny police station surrounded by five officers reporting a missing wallet. One can somewhat speak English and helps me give a description. In the small side room, I hear their “oos” and “oohs”.  

During my last months there I’m substituting for an English teacher in a small city outside of Osaka. The two older women in my lesson call me sensei and I feel that’s wrong. When I tell them their ordinary teacher is returning next week and I will be leaving Japan, they command me to return back to see them when I’m in Japan, they want me to teach in their city. My first night in my new dorm after having to move in the middle of finals, girls I’ve never met before invite me to make gyoza and the RA gets mad at us for being too loud a few hours later.  

There’s a lot about Japan that surprised me. Classes only met once a week and they’re two hours long. You can get groceries for a week for under 20 USD. I’d never seen more bikes in my life. The streets were impossibly small, yet a five-seat-long bus could cruise right down them. There was a rice paddy in the middle of my urban neighborhood! But what didn’t surprise me is how human it is. It’s the nature of humans to create an us versus them mindset and to view people as so vastly different from our in groups, but whenever people asked me, “How different is it there?” my only answer was, “well, it’s all very human.” 

Japan had been a dream of mine since middle school. The moment I learned about exchange opportunities I leaped at the chance and researched all I could. When I arrived in Japan I was at a strange point in my academic career. It was my third year, I was wavering on plans I thought were set in stone, and I felt lost. This continued into early months in the country. I enjoyed my academics, made friends, but I was unsure what it all meant in the long run. It wasn’t until my first solo trip across the country, from Osaka to Aomori, that I felt put back together. From that point on I fell in love with the Japanese countryside. My host city, Nishinomiya was not big by Japan’s standards but it’s proximity to Osaka would make most non-Japanese see it has a decently sized city. Rural Japan is often romanticized but rarely visited. I felt a pressure to enjoy the popular things of Japan, samurai, geisha, arcades, anime, the list goes on, but the moment I remember these are not the only things that make Japan, I took every opportunity to seek out the different. Trips to a town with yōkai statues, an abandoned railroad hike, the Osaka kofuns, and Jomon archaeological sites. I learned to love Japan as an individual.