From Japan to America: Adventures in Reverse Culture Shock

How my recent trip to the United States made me remember the good and bad of my birthplace.

East, er, Psyduck meets West.

Foreign Perspectives took a hiatus this month because I spent all of February in the United States and had much to catch up on after returning to Japan. The following piece is about that trip overseas. I will be returning to a regular posting schedule from now.

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It’s a bit of a running gag among my Twitter followers that no one can really place what my ethnicity is or where I’m from. Despite my bio clearly stating that I’m a Kyoto-based American researcher on Japan-North Korea relations, people often mistake me as everything from Japanese to Korean. As well as a CIA operative, but that’s a story for a different day.

In truth, I really am an American, having been born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for almost the first 20 years of my life. I’m also a Canadian citizen through my mother’s side, which is ethnically Lebanese, and also half-Chinese through my father’s side. My background takes about a paragraph to explain, and many different cultures influenced my upbringing. After moving to Japan for the first time in 2017, I’ve since gone back and forth between here and the U.S. on multiple occasions, but it was my most recent trip to Pittsburgh in February that really made me become aware of the concept of reverse culture shock.

The last time I had been to the U.S. was in late 2020 during unfortunate circumstances. My father was losing his battle with colon cancer, so it was my final opportunity to see him before he would pass away. Overseas travel at the height of the pandemic was already its own exhausting ordeal, but the added psychological and emotional stress of why I was going back only added to it. Since most of the U.S. was in lockdown or social distancing mode at the time, there was very little for me to do other than stay home with my family.

In contrast, my trip to the U.S. last month was a “real” holiday, and I brought my fiancee Minori with me. It was the first time I had been back in over three years, but also an opportunity to show someone who had never been overseas at all what American culture was “really” like. The few weeks I spent in the U.S. were largely pleasant ones, but they ultimately reaffirmed my choice to stay in Japan. As I’ve written in a previous piece, where you choose to live comes down to what trade-offs you’re willing to put up with. Those trade-offs will vary from person to person, but my most recent trip to America once again reminded me of what I liked and disliked of the country while growing up.

If a Primanti Bros. sandwich doesn’t represent the glorious excesses of American food, I don’t know what else does. Ok, maybe it’s really just a Pittsburgh thing.

One thing I was looking forward to the most upon revisiting the United States was enjoying all the food I normally can’t get in Japan. Being a Pittsburgh native, Primanti Bros. with its French fries and coleslaw stuffed sandwiches were of course a must, while I was dying to have real corned beef or pastrami as the Land of the Rising Sun doesn’t really have them. Being away from America for so long made me forget just how commonplace pizza and sandwich shops were in every town. Pizza in Japan is a very different, and often more expensive affair. Japanese convenience stores are of course known for their eclectic sandwiches, but good luck finding a genuine Italian hero apart from making them at home as I often do.

The food in America, while largely delicious, was also somewhat of a drawback. We were staying at my mother’s house, but her kitchen was being completely remodeled throughout the entire duration of the trip. That meant that apart from a home-cooked dinner one evening at my brother’s place, nearly every meal had to be takeout or at a sit-down restaurant. America’s food portions are notoriously huge to the amusement (and mostly horror) of foreigners, and my fiancee certainly took notice. It comes as no surprise that the U.S. continues to have one of the worst rates of obesity in the world.

We ate way more than either of us were normally used to and were rather sick of food in general by the time we returned home to Japan. The only reason I didn’t put on that much weight while visiting is because I made an active effort to walk and exercise as much as I could. With that said, I don’t think Americans fully comprehend the splendor of their massive supermarkets in comparison to other countries. Having become used to the far smaller grocery stores of Japan, I felt like a Cold War refugee from a communist country entering an American supermarket and being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices.

So this is how Gorby must have felt.

The theme of “big” is something that I think has uniquely defined the United States for most of its history. While Japan has to manage with only a tiny amount of land, us Americans revel in the large scale of our country and enjoy soaking it in as much as possible. It struck me how large the house I grew up in was after living in what’s essentially a shoebox of a Japanese apartment for so long. A nice shoebox in one of the most culturally rich cities on earth mind you, but a cramped dwelling nonetheless. Where I live close to the center of Kyoto is much cheaper than the equivalent studio apartment in an American city like New York or Chicago, but it’s going to be much smaller than even those. Remember what I said about trade-offs.

As much as I enjoyed being able to stretch my legs relatively further in America, that also came with needing to be more on guard about my surroundings than I normally would be in Japan. Besides staying in Pittsburgh, Minori and I had a weekend trip planned in Washington D.C. that required us to take a night bus to get there. I already made the rookie mistake of booking a Greyhound Bus (you can read some of the horror stories others have experienced here), but even worse than the shabby transport accommodations was the fact that we had to wait in the downtown Pittsburgh area until midnight. As I expected, Minori was terrified of the prospect.