When I tell people that I spent three years in Japan teaching English, the most common question I’m asked is “How was it?” The question seems easy enough to answer, and my usual response is “Oh, it was great.” But I’m always slightly dissatisfied with this answer-“It was great” is what you say when someone asks you what you think of a movie, and I had so many great experiences in my three years in Japan, I always feel that reducing the sum of everything I did in Japan into a short three word response doesn’t really answer the question. Sometimes though, I’m not even sure myself how to answer the question of how Japan was. Simply said, Japan was great, but describing in all the ways Japan has affected me is a more involved effort.

I have moments where I feel like Japan never happened at all. My college roommate still lives in the same apartment four blocks from campus, and when I visit him, I can walk around the neighborhood and see students running off to the library or relaxing at coffee shops or just walking around with backpacks, and if I don’t pay attention, I forget that I’m not a student anymore. Never mind that some of the students on campus now were still in elementary school when I started college. The current students look exactly as they did before I left Japan (like students, of course) and when I’ve walked on campus, I have caught myself feeling the need to check my schedule to see if I have a test to study for.

As much as I have felt that I never left for Japan, the strongest evidence I have that I spent three years in on the JET Program is being able to speak Japanese. Speaking Japanese is something I definitely couldn’t do before I went to Japan, and although I’m no language master by any means, being able to speak Japanese has allowed me to participate in groups such as JINA and the Japanese-English Toastmasters public-speaking club (also abbreviated JET). Before I left for Japan, the only foreign language I had studied was Spanish, and I had studied it not because I wanted to speak Spanish, but rather, because studying a foreign language was a college entrance requirement. Somehow, the idea that studying a foreign language would allow me to talk to new people I couldn’t talk to before didn’t impress me. I suppose that kind of thinking is easy when you’re lucky enough to speak English-for better or for worse, the language of the world-natively. Because of my experience in Japan, I can chat with every Japanese tourist I see walking the streets of San Francisco, and that makes me happy.

I know that I definitely have a different perspective of things in my life after Japan. Before Japan, I had never ventured very far from the Bay Area, but now, I’ve gained confidence living in a different country and learning a new language, and I hope to be able to do the same again someday. I’ve retained a few Japanese mannerisms-I apologize more than I used to; I order a small (a.k.a. “tall”) at Starbucks because the large size seems obnoxiously huge to me; and I make the peace sign every time my picture is taken. While doing things like making peace signs when posing for pictures may not be socially cool here in America (as much as I try to change that), part of the perspective I’ve gained with my JET experience is knowing that there exists a place in the world such things are cool. The world is a bigger place than just the Bay Area, and teaching English among the rice fields is what helped me appreciate this.