The gist of this book is a guy, from the UK, moves to Japan after college to work in a school over there. With no Japanese and never being there before, it’s a trial by fire and he’s to deal with the culture clash and other random situations of a small, relatively rural corner of Japan. A while in he starts a YouTube channel and this grows over time into a great success.
The book itself is split into two parts. The first is about moving to Japan, getting over the culture shock and settling in. The second is about his success as a YouTuber and the opportunities that afforded.
I think the best/most interesting thing about this book for me is the first part. I’m not saying the second part isn’t good, but it does take a different approach to things. The first very much focuses on the small details of living in a relatively unknown corner of Japan. Even just moving to a new country is an interesting story, much more so a country like Japan where the language barrier is great and the culture is vastly different to somewhere like the UK. I find it just so interesting to learn about the mundane or trivial every day interactions. I read before, in The Discovery of France the following quote about how the more people that have an experience, the less evidence we have about it:
IT SEEMS TO BE a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience, the less evidence remains of that experience. There are hundreds of pointlessly detailed accounts of banal coach journeys made by tourists, but the odysseys undertaken by migrants have vanished like most of the routes they walked.
This book about everyday experiences in Japanese life from an outsiders perspective falls into that category for me too.
There’s one situation where he was brought to meet the principal of the school he’d be working with. Being an awkward just-out-of-college student he’d not much idea of what to do or say so when the principal fell silent for an extended period he became worried.
I’d later learn that in Japanese culture these long periods of silence, chinmoku (沈黙), were commonplace. It has its roots in Zen Buddhism, where silence is said to hold the secrets of existence. The Japanese proverb ‘It is better to leave many things unsaid’ captures the essence of chinmoku. Far from being awkward, in Japan silence is a natural part of daily interactions. However, on this first day at the school, I had yet to discover this, and left the principal’s office wondering just how long I’d last here. I had an awful lot to learn.
Another part of the culture shock is apparently the Japanese use names far more than we do in western cultures:
Given that the Japanese use names far more frequently when talking to someone than an English person would (the word ‘you’ is considered almost rude in Japanese), it was going to be quite a challenge.
To overcome this he took it on himself to learn the name of every teacher at the school he’d be working with, no small task given the relatively large size of the school which employed 110 teachers.
I’d been given a booklet with names and profile photos of each one of the 110 teachers. Aided by a book on memorization techniques I’d snapped up at Heathrow airport, I used word association to force the names into my head. Asami Shinya I visualized someone knocking over a cup of Assam tea with their shin.
The second part is about his life as a YouTuber. This less about day to day interactions with Japanese culture and more focuses on the viral or high points in his life. Far out of reach for the most of us and for some reason I don’t find it as interesting as the first part, though that’s not to say it’s not entertaining.
One part that did leave a mark though was a part on his time travelling around areas heavily impacted by the 2011 earthquake and following tsunami. One interview with an old woman who, having lost almost everything in the years before and including 2011, remained upbeat and positive about life. On being asked about how she does she replied:
‘The secret to getting through the pain is I don’t look back,’ she told me. ‘If I ever look back at what happened, it’ll be when I’m seventy or eighty. I don’t want to dwell on the past, nor do I expect too much from the future. If I can get by now, if I can live in the moment, I can keep going.’
Overall its a pretty entertaining book. I’m not sure why I picked up this book really in the first place. I’d never heard of the guy or watched his videos and barring a passing interest in Japan I’d no reason to read it. But I’m glad I did because its one of those books that shines a light on a particular experience in a country in a way that most will never experience. Even today the same experience would probably be very different with modern language translation and mapping tools.