Samantha Cedilote: Standing Out and Blending In Between Differing Societies
“You do realize that you’d be able to blend in pretty much anywhere else you chose right?” These were the words my professor asked me after I told him my study abroad choice, a statement that I knew and had accepted was true. However, I don’t think that I had ever really thought about it much or understood what it meant until then. I had never thought much at all about blending in, or that not blending in was some sort of crime.
While I look completely normal in the hodgepodge that is America, the same can’t be said about Japan.
When I first arrived in Japan one of the first things that I noticed was the homogeneity. While of course people didn’t look like carbon copies of each other, there was an overwhelming similarity throughout the crowds. Almost everyone wore black and white, or in some cases dark blue, pretty much everyone had black hair and slender frames, everyone was even walking the same speed somehow. I don’t have the same petite frame as Japanese women, nor a normal height by any Japanese standards, I have larger hands, larger feet, lighter skin, lighter eyes, and the most damning evidence of all, bright blonde hair. While normal here, in Japan it is an obvious sign of my being a “gaijin”. An outsider.
“Gaijin” was a word they taught us at school orientation. A word that when being nice means “foreigner”, but translates literally to “outside person” and is commonly used more as “outsider” or even “alien”. Japan is an incredibly homogenous society, and no matter how good your Japanese is, how similarly you dress to everyone else, and no matter your manners and mannerisms, if you look different you will immediately be recognized as a gaijin.
There are good and bad things that come with being a gaijin. Our school kept telling us that if we got confused, needed help, did a minor thing wrong it would be okay because we have what is known as “the gaijin pass”. Essentially, the gaijin pass means that people won’t expect you to do things right, so if you mess up you are immediately forgiven because that was what was expected of you. But if you do things right you are sometimes praised heavily for the littlest things. A simple polite “dozo” (go ahead) can lead to shock and praise from people around you. However, there is also the darker side to this.. There is a concept known as a “gaijin seat” where it is very common in Japan if a foreigner is sitting on a seat on the train, then no one will take the seat next to them on either side. Leaving a 2 seat empty gap even during the busiest hours.
The realities of being a gaijin in Japan greatly varies depending on where you are, and will always vary since people are always different. Tokyo, one of the most over-touristed prefectures, is not great for gaijins in my personal experience. The people there are over-run with foreigners and tourists who don’t always abide by the many many unspoken rules in Japan, and all foreigners in Tokyo are immediately assumed to be tourists. Very similar to New York City here in America, tourists are either easy marks for scams or avoided as annoyances.
In my city, Takarazuka, in Hyogo prefecture, there is very little foreign tourism and most tourists were from within Japan. And since a big international school was nearby, many didn’t even bat an eye at us walking around. There were even times we got stopped by English speaking alumni that wanted to know if we were students from the school and would always get super excited when we were.
I once went to a school run event that was for Japanese and foreign students to get to know each other. I was the only obviously foreign student who decided to go, and when it came time for everyone to exchange contacts and ask questions I was swarmed and backed into a corner by a mob of Japanese girls who all wanted to talk to me and follow me online. The other students who had gone with me were less obviously foreign and were trying their hardest to get a couple people from the mob surrounding me to talk to them. The event coordinator eventually had to step in trying to get the crowd under control, and ended up having to physically pull me out of the mob of schoolgirls so that I wouldn’t miss the bus home.
But the very next week when I went more into the countryside down in Kumamoto, where grown men would shrink away from me on the bus and huddle themselves and their bags as far away from me as possible. A day later in the same area, multiple people stopped me in the streets asking where I was from and wanting to hear stories and practice their English with me, so it really can change in a heartbeat.
Unlike Japan, in America there is a lot of physical diversity, so blending in physically was never a big concern of mine since it was pretty easy. I had never even really thought about it until moving to Japan. However, this experience made me think more about other forms of fitting in. There were plenty of Japanese mannerisms I adopted, sitting positions, hand gestures, speech patterns, expressions, ways of dressing, even the way I carried myself just standing or walking around I changed to match better and blend in. While I was still very obviously foreign, shop owners and random people on the street even outside of my city would stop and ask me if I was a student rather than assuming I was a tourist. These moments strangely became some of my proudest accomplishments abroad.
When I returned to America I was immediately hit with a wave of diversity. People were everywhere. There was so much all at once, shapes, colors, sounds, I saw people in groups for time in months, hearing and understood public conversations again, and even hearing Spanish again. It was crazy for me! I spent so long trying to blend in that I forgot how to be myself again. I remember walking around the airport just trying to get used to everything again, it was so different from what I had been immersed in and was almost overwhelming.
Thinking about the differences in needing to blend in made me think about my future, and if I would need to adjust again. I realized that there would be a lot of times in my future where I would have to transition to a different way of blending in, just as I went from blending in in America to blending in in Japan, and then back to America, the same was true for smaller changes. Changes such as the transition from a student to an employee and then hopefully from an employee to a manager, and all sorts of little changes as well. I realized that I had been making changes like this my whole life and that it was nothing new and nothing to be worried about. We will always find new things to change and new things to adapt to no matter who we are, no matter what stage of life, and no matter where we are in the world. People change, situations change, but we will always find a way to adapt!
Samantha is a Business Administration: Hospitality Management Major with a Minor in International Business from Florence, SC. During Fall Semester her junior year she studied abroad in Hyogo prefecture Japan, as the only Lander student in Japan at the time. She has been working as a director at a Summer camp for most of her college career, and plans to use her degree to work in resorts in cruise lines after an internship with Disney after graduation.