Reiu
High School in Japan
by , January 16th, 2013 at 03:39 AM (2352 Views)
Summer of 2011. Being the year of the earthquake, instead of gloriousAkihabaraTokyo exchange students were relegated to various southern locations away from the Northeast. The luckier ones ended up in Osaka. I was, sadly, not one of them.
This being years after my weaboo phase, I felt cynical and wise in my knowledge that the real Japan was nothing like the animu Japan I had so adored in junior high. Animu high school, I was sure, was about as different from real Japanese high school as Hogwarts was from, say, a bankrupt American public school.
How wrong I was.
High school, Hiroshima. Making the obligatory round of self-introductions in all the second year classes (they had mistakenly put me in the wrong year): my-name-is-so-and-so-and-I-am-from-California-I-will-be-in-your-care-for-the-next-two-weeks-よろしくお願いします. You know, the drill.
Q&A session time. Expected: 5 seconds of awkward silence before I was allowed to take my seat.
Not expected: questions, questions, questions. Was I dating someone, why was I able to speak Japanese, was I dating someone, what did I want to do when I grew up, was I dating someone, did I know who AKB48 were, was I dating someone, was California a city in Germany?* And so on.
*Someone else then informed the class that it was, in fact, part of New York.
Lunchtime was more of the same. Half the people in my homeroom clustered their desks around mine as they continued to bombard me with questions. I was requested to say something in English, anything. So I said, in English, "Anything?" This was met by gushing of "kyahhh~" and "kakkoii~" Some of the girls then brought their friends from other classes; soon the population in the classroom dangerously neared critical mass. These friends then requested me to say more stuff in English, so I obliged. Cue more gushing. Utterly mystified, I began to wonder if this was all some sort of prank.
In any case, I knew that the novelty would wear out soon, and that everything would be back to the drab normality of Japanese high school the next day.
It got worse.
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