Actually, these aren't lessons I learned from Japan as such, but rather lessons learned as a result of living isolated in a foreign culture.
1. Good friends are worth the effort.
Ever had a friend you really really like but don't feel especially close to for whatever reasons are keeping you apart? Maybe they're a long drive away. Maybe they seem to have a lot of other stuff going on in their lives. Maybe you're just not sure how to open up a D&M conversation with them. Or whatever. In these cases, you can expect that your friendship will remain a surface one until one or both of you takes the plunge and makes the effort to get together. Good relationships take time and effort. It can be a risky emotional investment but it's like the financial variety -- high risk, high returns. Closely related to this is:
2. You can't really have a close friendship with someone until you've shared some of the raw, deep and intimately personal experiences of life.
I've had the honour of developing two special friendships during my time in Japan. One of them has been on-line only, nevertheless we now know stuff about each other that either nobody else knows, or at least very few other people know. I consider this woman one of my best friends. The other friend is M, who I've mentioned a few times in passing on this blog. M was very helpful to me in the lead-up to Elliott's birth (poor thing; how could she have ever predicted that she'd meet a crazy Australian who would take her on a grand adventure into the world of freebirthing?), and even more so afterwards when I needed practical support for adjusting to life as mother of two. Later I was able to return the favour in a rather unexpected way; M had a miscarriage, and was able to lean on me for the emotional support she needed to wait out the agonising four weeks between learning that her baby had died and actually having the miscarriage. Her other choice was to have surgery, which she feels she surely would have done, and then regretted, if it hadn't been for my support. After her experience, our friendship took on a palpable new quality, and then when my life fell apart in the last two months of our stay she was there for me in a way I wouldn't have felt comfortable to ask for before. (There's not too many people I'd feel OK to sleep in front of while they watch my kids as well as their own.) Until the last two or three years of my life I've never felt like I had any close friends, but I'm learning to let go of the issues which have historically prevented me from getting close to people, and the result is already so rewarding (see #1).
3. Live church services really are a blessing.
I think this is one of those lessons I already knew in theory, but having lived the reality, I truly understand now. Most of the time on Sabbaths we downloaded sermons off our church's website. Sometimes we were able to hook up to a live church service back home, and we always enjoyed this opportunity to feel a little more involved. But nothing beats actually being there. A human connection is always better than an electronic one. I have a new appreciation of the verse about "not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together" now.
4. It's not better or worse, it's just different.
I must admit that this is one I have to keep reminding myself of, since I left Japan still finding some of its habits kinda irritating, but anyway: So often we can look down on what other cultures do when their practices seem awkward, difficult, inconsistent, gross or just plain weird. Most of the time, though, I think it's just that our comfort zone is being challenged. I started learning this lesson on the very first day we arrived here. We were at Tokyo station and I was busting for a pee. I found some women's toilets and to my mild discomfort realised they were all the squat variety. I had never actually used a squat toilet before, but I was desperate and knew it wasn't worth the effort to go looking for a "Western-style" toilet. So I used it, and it really wasn't that bad. Some weeks later I had to make use of another one and was delighted to discover they're even easier to use when you face the right direction (towards the flush, not away from it). These days squat toilets don't faze me in the slightest. I don't prefer them, but neither do I deliberately avoid them. They're not better or worse, just different. Same deal applies to most things.
