A Beautiful Sunday Afternoon
Coming off a sojourn in Honolulu, I arrived in Kansai as a young man with the yen equivalent of about two hundred fifty dollars, an open roundtrip ticket, a large mountain pack, and all the ideas afforded one by four years paid in tuition for a liberal arts education.
Somehow with dumb perseverance and daily rations of instant ramen, I survived long enough to get a teaching job at an English conversation school to support myself.
The first year for an expat in Japan is the same for all. The first three months is spent thinking everything Japanese is wonderful, the second three months is spent thinking everything Japanese is horrible, and the remaining six months is spent thinking you know everything Japanese and don’t mind letting everyone know it.
I was in the third stage. It was during Golden Week in May, and the weather was sunny and warm. I was with an Irish friend of mine from the school, and we were with two young Japanese ladies on the terrace of a coffeeshop in Kobe. He and I were in a high-spirited debate over something that I have no recollection of now.
In the middle of our conversation, one of the women asked me what we were talking about and when I told her she said, “Why are you talking about such a difficult subject on a beautiful Sunday afternoon?”
I was speechless, and rightfully so, but I was fairly convinced then, as I am today, that I wasted four years of tuition on a liberal arts education.
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