(This is part three of a series of blog posts about my experience studying abroad in Japan this semester. I plan to talk about how I made the decision to study abroad as well as what my experience here is like. You can find the earlier parts here.)
On my very first full day in Japan, I wanted to go to Osaka and eat fried chicken. In the cafeteria during breakfast, I loudly expressed this desire to the first fifteen people I met. Wouldn’t it be awesome, I opined, to spend our first night here roaming around the canal-side neighborhood of Dotonbori, going to restaurants and shops and arcades and all the like? I convinced a few people and, after conducting a few administrative tasks – buying a SIM card that would work in Japan, getting a rail pass, and so on – we hit the streets. The heart of Osaka is about twenty miles from my study abroad program. None of us, of course, had a car, and taxis cost a lot of money. But that was fine. You see, we were going to figure out how to take the train.
As the dean of our program told us on that first day, studying abroad is not entirely about the classes. Of course the coursework is an integral part of the experience (and I’ve written elsewhere about what I’ve already learned in my classes). But – as the dean went on – the ‘co-curricular’ aspects of the program are just as important. What you do outside of the classes matters. And it turns out that outside of my classes, I spend a lot of time riding trains.
Cut back to that first day. We left our dorm and realized there were two train stations in the area. One was a short walk away, while getting to the other would require walking down a massive hill and over two bridges – a distance of almost a mile. But the farther train station was also much bigger, and more trains stopped there. Which should we go to? We weren’t sure.
Google Maps chimed in, telling us to walk to the first train station, then take a slower, local train to the next one, where we could get on a fast limited-express train headed all the way to Osaka. We tried to carry out this plan. We really tried, but we transferred onto the wrong train. And we arrived in Osaka almost half an hour after we planned to.
This was, however, a valuable learning experience for me. Japan’s public transport system is much more extensive than America’s, and also much more complex. Though I’ve never really had much experience with public transportation before this semester, I’ve come to appreciate how, once you learn to navigate, it’s actually very easy to get around here.
I have had to learn to navigate, and I think I’ve gotten much better in the two months since I got here. I recently went to Tokyo and to the Mount Fuji region for spring break, where I rode highway buses, a robotic railway in the southeast of Tokyo, the Shinkansen (Japan’s ultra-high-speed ‘bullet train’), and countless subways and trains. It’s a unique joy to be able to get on a train or a bus and know exactly where I’m going.
Of course, I still do make mistakes. I almost missed the bullet train back from Tokyo because I went to the wrong bullet train platform, which was on the other side of the station from the correct platform. But by and large, it has become very easy for me to get around. And even though navigating on public transportation wasn’t something that I planned to learn how to do when I came to Japan, it’s a skill that I now absolutely appreciate.
