My Summer in Tokyo

It was 1984, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Saint Mary College, and I was twenty. Along with another Saint Marian, Diane, I was an exchange student in an international program at Sophia University in Tokyo. I took two courses, Japanese Religion and Japanese Literature. The literature professor had translated one of the novels we studied! (When I entered English Mass very late one morning, I learned that he was also a priest.)

His course brought Japanese history and culture alive for me. But my experiences outside the classroom were much more deeply transformative. They changed not just my interests and knowledge, but me myself.

Of course, exploring the world’s largest city increased my confidence, curiosity, and sense of adventure. Were my horizons broadened? Yes, but that cliché doesn’t do justice to the lessons I learned—and am still learning—about myself and my world view.

What I learned was both humbling and empowering—a delightful paradox shared by many who study abroad.

I can best try to describe it via two key moments. One involves the Great Buddha of Kamakura (an hour from Tokyo by train), and the other involves a jar of peanut butter.

Yes, peanut butter.

Let’s start with the statue, one of Japan’s top attractions.

Part of what made my encounter with the Amida Buddha (Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Buddha of Limitless Life) so impactful was the day’s journey to reach him. And part of what made that journey impactful had to do with twenty-year-old me. I was a completely novice traveler from small-town Iowa. My flights to Tokyo were my first flights ever (oh, the thrill of the take-off!). Before I landed in Tokyo, the largest city I’d ever explored was Kansas City.

Tokyo stunned me with its sheer number of people.

Consider this photo I took of a shopping district in a section of Tokyo called Harajuku. Even now I feel overwhelmed looking at all those people shoulder to shoulder.

So when Diane and I made a day-trip to Kamakura, it turned out to be a welcome respite from the crowds of Tokyo. It gently rained most of the day, so I imagine that Kamakura was quieter than usual.

In my journal, I recorded us “going through a huge row of torii gates.”

Such gates signify the transition from the mundane to the sacred, and I did indeed feel like I was entering an extraordinary space. It was a forest—shoulder to shoulder trees—interspersed with moss-covered lanterns, incense, waterfalls, and carp ponds. We crossed a steep vermilion lacquered bridge (Vermilion! Almost like my last name! Also the color of those gates above). There was a lotus field. And still more trees. I was so absorbed with all this loveliness that when we rounded a bend in the path, I was taken by surprise.

There was Buddha, sitting solidly and serenely, dwarfing the mountains behind him. He was the biggest statue I’d ever seen (and even now, the biggest sacred statue I’ve seen). But it wasn’t just his size that moved me. It was his age, the centuries of people who had sought him out and gazed on him since well before Chaucer started The Canterbury Tales. I felt connected to these people, and looking at Buddha’s peaceful face, I felt like I was part of something larger than myself.

I was humbled to discover that I could be awe-struck by a representation of a spiritual figure outside my own tradition. I was humbled by how little I knew about whatever had inspired these feelings. Humbled by how little I knew about myself. About the world I shared with the many people who had also marveled in front of the Amida Buddha.

But it was empowering and thrilling to realize that I had much more to feel and learn than I had ever imagined. So many more opportunities to be surprised, to be taken beyond myself. To grow.

In experiencing my limits and my smallness (compared to the statue and all it represented), I had expanded my sense of possibility.

How could a jar of peanut butter have offered a similar lesson? Given all the wonders that Japan offered me, how can I even remember a jar of peanut butter?

To understand, you need still more info about my experience with the vast crowds of Tokyo. Before I left the States, I knew that once I was in Japan, I would stand out as a white person and a foreigner. But I had not been prepared for how this would make me feel. Nor had I known how very few other white people there would be outside of the university. Indeed, I was shocked that I saw very few people of any other race besides Asian. (A fellow student from Hong Kong told me that she was surprised to see very few other Asians who were not Japanese.)

So despite the fact that nearly every Japanese person I talked with was friendly and helpful, I felt like an outsider. This feeling was compounded by my gender. Like most twenty-year-old women, I had already experienced plenty of unwanted attention from men in my own country. But as a woman of average size and looks, I was not used to being continually gawked at and commented on. (Many of the comments involved my “big hips,” according to a Japanese friend’s reluctant translation. And, bizarrely, nearly all these comments were made by middle-aged men in business suits.) Most of the time, I ignored their stares and focused on taking everything else in, but when I was out and about in the city, I felt like I was always on display.

There was also all the “strange” food. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family. My mom did not even cook with garlic. So although I loved udon—and tempura when I could afford it—I was tired of noodles and stir fry. And although I very much appreciated my Japanese friends who treated Diane and me to sushi, sea urchin had been a bridge too far, and I was longing for some familiar food.

Diane was similarly inclined, so about a month and half into our stay, we determined that we had to have peanut butter sandwiches.

The bread was no problem. We had been purchasing it at a store near the YWCA where we stayed so we could make toast every morning for breakfast.

But the peanut butter.

The clerk at the store where we bought our bread repeated our request without comprehension. So we hiked to a larger grocery store and queried another clerk. “We do not have anything like that,” she said, as if we had requested something unspeakable, porn or baby seal meat. At the next grocery store, the clerk looked sorry for us. “Maybe try the fancy department store?” She gave us directions.

We couldn’t imagine that a fancy store would carry peanut butter, but we were determined to try everything we could to complete our quest. We probably even took a train.

The store was the biggest I’d ever been in, several floors high. Diane and I studied the store directory, and were relieved to see that there was a food section. Alas, we saw no peanut butter in it.

With a sinking heart, I forced myself to ask yet one more clerk for peanut butter. The handsome middle-aged man gave us an amused smile. “Peanut butter, you will find in Exotic Foods.”

Diane and I gaped at each other. Peanut butter? Exotic?

We followed the man, me wondering what kind of special peanut butter we would find. What if it was some sophisticated Japanese brand that tasted nothing like our peanut butter?

The man paused and scanned the bottom shelf. I spotted it before he did.

A jar of Jif—something I ate nearly every day back home. My peanut butter. Exotic.

“Thank you,” I said, grabbing the Jif. I couldn’t look at Diane for fear that I’d burst out laughing. And laugh we did, once we were out of the clerk’s earshot, all the way back to the Y and every time we savored our peanut butter sandwiches.

But for me it was sometimes an uneasy laughter, and sometimes, our quest seemed like more than a funny story to tell on myself. Over the years, I’ve wondered why it remains such a persistent memory.

The word ‘exotic’ comes from Latin, Greek, and French words meaning outside.

So maybe the word ‘exotic’ tapped into my own mostly repressed feelings about myself as an outsider in Japan. Likely, it was—and maybe is—easier to think about peanut butter than about the men who seemed to view me as exotic.

But when I focus on my limitations rather than on the sexism of those men, I think there is a more important set of lessons. Lessons that I hope make me a more inclusive teacher. A more hospitable human being.

As a twenty year old, I knew intellectually that there is no such thing as ordinary or normal, that what is ordinary in one culture may be unthinkable or exotic in another. Yet clearly I had not made that knowledge my own. I had not applied it to me. I easily and unthinkingly assumed that my ordinary was the world’s ordinary.

My surprise in that department store was my bad—a result of my unexamined (white American) privilege. Still, it taught me how jolting it can be when you realize that other people see your ordinary as strange and unusual.

It taught me that it is all too easy to inadvertently make an outsider feel like even more of an outsider. Unlike the rude men on the street, who had to know that their stares were making me uncomfortable, the store employee who categorized the peanut butter as exotic likely had no idea that the label would have any impact (besides helping customers locate imported food).

I do not want to inadvertently heighten someone’s discomfort with being an outsider. This is especially true for my international students and for my students who might feel like outsiders: the only Black student (or Latino or Muslim or immigrant student) in the classroom. Because of the peanut butter in Japan, I try not to treat their ordinary as unusual. So I try to learn what their ordinary is. And I remind myself that even though it’s exciting and fun to study in a new place, it’s also exhausting and difficult.

Of course, my experiences as an outsider in Japan were nothing compared to the microaggressions and physical danger that some of my current students face. But that sad fact makes me all the more eager to help them feel welcome and important.

Studying abroad made me hungry—not for peanut butter—but for more opportunities to discover my limitations, expand my vision, and open my mind and heart.