In my second post on my experiences in Japan I want to talk about the acceptance of being wrong and how you can embrace it in order to help you along your journey. This will be a pretty lengthy post, so feel free to skip around. 🙂
For me personally I’ve always struggled with perfectionism and was always afraid of messing up or doing the wrong thing. My time in Japan, however, helped me with that fear.
When I got to Japan I was thrown into a world of non-English speaking family members and friends, so at first I was nervous about speaking in a different language. I knew that with my host family I could say something wrong and they would help me through it, but what about at school in front of strangers? Will it become a barrier to making friends? I would soon find out.
During orientation we were given two students from the university who gave us a small tour, and then they generously took us to our respective host family’s houses in order to show us the way. It was with these two students that my negative thoughts began to change. As a foreigner who had just started living in Japan for the first time I wasn’t quite used to the speed at which people talked, so at some parts of the conversation I didn’t quite understand what they were saying. Instead of just saying nothing and ignoring I asked them to repeat it a bit slower, or I just gave an answer in hopes it was the right one. Even if my answer had no relevance to what they were asking, they just repeated themselves and tried to make it easier for me to respond. This way everyone was working towards an understanding for all of us to comprehend. Therefore instead of trying to shy away from discussions, I highly recommend just plowing through and 頑張るing (Japanese-English hybrid of doing your best) because that’s how you’ll get the most out of your experience and language skills.
My two other experiences relating to overcoming fear of being wrong occurred while I was on a short vacation in Osaka with some of my study abroad friends. We arrived in Nanba around 5:00 PM, and we did a little bit of wandering around trying to see what we were near. After going in and out of shops, my favorite being Don Quixote, which is, in the wise words of my friend, “As if walmart and the dollar store had a baby and tried LSD, we finally got to the hostel around 11:00 PM. Our little adventure didn’t stop there, however, and we decided to do some more wandering. After we visited a couple of pubs it got to around 1:00 AM, and there was just about one thing on our American minds: FROZEN YOGURT. As we scrambled around desperately searching for frozen yogurt I saw in the window of McDonalds: try our pumpkin soft serve. I LOVE PUMPKIN ANYTHING. I marched in, walked up to the counter, and asked for some pumpkin soft serve. The lady looked at me with a curious face, as if to facially notify me that something was wrong, and if my fear of being wrong had kicked in I would’ve just left, but I held my ground and told her that I speak Japanese. In response to that she held up her arms in an X shape and I felt as if I had been hit with an X beam and was blown back. I still didn’t understand why she had given me a batsu, (maybe my Japanese was wrong) but after a little more give and take she explained that they had turned off the machine. My quest for pumpkin soft serve ended in sadness.
Our final batsu on that trip came when we were looking for my friend’s lost pocket wifi. After back tracking all of our rides we finally got to the roller coaster which had been our most recent ride we left. As we approached the gate where you exit the ride, the kind man quickly hit us with a batsu, but we didn’t let that stop us. We needed to ask about the pocket wifi. The man then happily told us to ask inside with lost and found, and surely enough, they had the pocket wifi! Imagine if we had instantly given into the fear of being wrong with the man; we would have turned our backs and may have never found out about lost and found.
I hope you found this entertaining and somewhat helpful! You should never be afraid of being wrong, and just go out and follow your heart.
Life: The Great Race 