Prologue

Prologue: An Essay on Beginnings

I should probably start from the beginning, which like any beginning is really hard to trace. I suppose you could say that this thing had three beginnings. One was back in my sophomore year at Illinois Wesleyan University, when I was trying to find a roommate for my junior year and realized that all my friends had decided to move off campus—and not informed me of their decisions.

            Sour grapes aside, I had decided a while back that I wanted to live in the prestigious I-House. I-House was originally a mansion, and its official name is Kemp Hall on the University maps. After over a decade, though, it had been a theme house for so long that President Wilson actually gave the hall the honorary title “I-House” by the time I left. But every year we had to renew our pledge, which was: To be a safe haven and a place of mingling for international students of Illinois Wesleyan University with American students of Illinois Wesleyan University, sharing cultural diversity and offering various programs through which we could learn about different cultures. 

            Being, in sequence, an Anthropology Major/International Studies Major/Asian Concentration Major/Philosophy Minor/Japanese Minor/ FINALLY-settling-on-Creative Writing Major, I was very interested in the international side of things. The only problem getting into I-House was that there is a very limited number of spaces, with it being an old mansion gifted by a wealthy dentist in the Bloomington community. The board overseeing applications was also very strict, and the application itself included essays and short answer questions. But the biggest thing was finding a roommate—which, as previously stated, I didn’t have.

            Luckily for me, a current resident, Ross, was a pretty good friend of mine and knew another applicant looking for a roommate named Nicole. Now, I had no idea who Nicole was and she had no idea who I was: All we knew was that we both trusted Ross and Ross thought that we would work. So, to strengthen both of our applications and on a leap of faith we put each other down as roommates.

            After the selection process and our acceptance, the only communications Nicole and I had were through Facebook or Ross, and the only really hard-core communications were when we were emailing each other about what each of us was bringing for the room. Anyway, things turned out alright and one way or another Nicole and I actually became very good friends over my course of time at Illinois Wesleyan my junior year.

            Unfortunately, due to a medical condition I was forced to leave Wesleyan three-quarters of the way through that junior year and take two years off of school entirely. This, however, did not stop the friendship between Nicole and I, or the friendship I had developed with her boyfriend Phil--who became a sort of older brother/father figure to me, despite being a year younger than me. So between the two of them, I spent a good amount of time visiting their apartment on campus over the next two years.

            The second beginning comes from a longer-standing friendship I had developed my freshman year at Wesleyan. Cory was a super-senior when I met him in Japanese 101, and we hit it off pretty quickly. He was dating a Japanese woman who had been an exchange student at Wesleyan and graduated the year before I arrived, and around December of 2007 Cory and his girlfriend became engaged. It was because of this engagement that as a Music Performance Major Cory began popping up in all of my Asian Studies classes, and it was through him that I first heard of JET: The Japanese English Teacher Programme.

            JET is a high-end institution under the direct control of the Japanese government. Its sole purpose is to recruit and provide top-notch native English speakers with an undergraduate degree in any field to teach English at various schools around Japan. The application process is a cut above demanding, requiring several letters of recommendation and essays to be written within a time frame of several months. After the paper application, you receive an email notification if you managed to get an in-person interview or not. The interviews all take place in Chicago, done panel-style with the applicant sitting before several judges asking various questions.

            And Cory was jumping into all of this feet first, to move to Japan and be with his fiancée. Luckily, his references were top-notch and from native Japanese speakers, as well as a retired JET Programme employee working as a professor in the Anthropology Department. Cory himself is highly intelligent, and his interview went extremely well.

            After he was accepted and placed on the mainland in Tochigi-chi prefecture, we stayed in touch. We had become very close friends over the school year, and he was one of my best support people and confidantes. Even after his engagement fell through, he decided to stay in Japan and after a few years I vowed to visit him. After all, he was one of my best friends, and I always wanted to visit Japan—hence all the Asian Studies.

            Thus started my first Japan Trip in 2009. I somehow talked my mother, (who had no interest in visiting Japan prior to my suggestion,) into taking a tour with me for a week with Yokoso! Japan tours. The idea was that I would spend a week travelling with her and the tour, and when it was over I would crash on Cory’s living room floor for a week and head home.

            The tour portion was an amazing sampler of major cities and festivals, and the temples were gorgeous. While staying with Cory, his then-girlfriend Miyu was an excellent hostess and tour guide, taking me to some UNESCO heritage cites as well as a ramen place with the best Western Ice Cream around.

            But the biggest advantage I had at the time was my knowledge. I had the advantage of just having finished Japanese language class. I still talked to a lot of my friends at Wesleyan who had yet to graduate and were still in the Asian Studies concentration, and I still had a pretty good grasp of the culture. I was feeling pretty good; I managed to navigate my way—ME, who has no sense of direction whatsoever—through the twists and turns of the Japanese Rail system, which is seriously far more efficient than anything in America. I even took a trip on the Shinkansen with the tour, which helped greatly later when I went to Tochigi from Kyoto all by myself.

            When all was said and done, I managed to use the directions Cory had printed out for me to catch all the right trains, all by myself, back to Narita Airport outside Tokyo and fly home… knowing that I a) had a better sense of direction than I thought and b) definitely wanted to come back to Japan.

            Well, my opportunity came with my third beginning: Fast forwarding a couple of years and going back to my friend Nicole. Even before her graduation, Nicole wanted nothing more than to be a JET teacher. Or a Korean teacher. Actually, anything outside the country of America would probably have done just as well: She really, really wanted to get out into the world. But because the country of Japan was her primary focus and she graduated with a BA in Anthropology, her strongest bet was the JET program. Much like Cory, she was helped by who wrote her evaluations but her advisor told her it was really her interview that would make or break her.

            I actually went into Chicago to act as support for that very interview. She had taken the earliest Amtrak she could get out of Normal, and it ended up running three hours late—a record, I’m sure, even with Amtrak’s history. The train was so late that she actually missed her original interview time, and had to call from the train to reschedule for the last available time they had.

            Now, Nicole is a pretty calm person with an even head. She has a way of putting people at ease and a knack for seeing the big picture, and as a result others like to come to her and drop all their problems in her lap and ask her to sort through them like some free therapy session. The reason Nicole and I work is because while I have my share of problems, I also know when to shut up and listen to hers. But because of her “calm” nature, not a lot of people catch on that they should stop talking and start listening. As a result, very few people have ever seen a stressed-out, tight-wound, nervous Nicole—she only has a select few people to vent to.

            That day it was literally snowing sideways in downtown. I had just gotten my hair done with my mother at salon ZeZa and was walking to Water Tower Place, and I looked like a tree in the middle of a field: One side of me covered in white, and with a few snow flakes making it right into my ear canal. But Nicole had called, and she had told me what had happened, and she hadn’t sounded anywhere near “calm.”

            We met up at the Water Tower Place, and I saw her parents first. On top of everything else, Nicole had gotten a blister that was bleeding through her sock and had gone off to buy band aides. I gave her parents a hug, and went for “cheerful” even though I could tell that they were tense, too. When Nicole came down the escalator, I ran up and gave her a big hug and then we sat down on the floating bench behind customer service on the main floor, faced the mini food court, and talked until she had to go to her interview.

            We walked to the building, and I waited with her parents during the interview. They both seemed more relaxed, and her mother thanked me for coming out. After about twenty minutes or so, Nicole came back down with mixed feelings because she had had a good interview, but she had had to reschedule and she wasn’t sure how that would effect her score. So I told her: “You’re going to make it in, and then I’m going to have to work really hard so I can get enough money to visit you.”

            As you can probably guess, given the nature of this blog, she made it in. And the third beginning set in motion eight months of working at Portillo’s Hot Dogs on Rte. 34, nine months of working at my Father’s office as a part-time file person, and a whole lot of saving. Add onto that my senior year at university, and I had a full plate.

            But I had made a promise, and as a gift to myself for graduation I was going to see it through.