I once made this thread two years ago, so here it is again.
When I was 14 years old, I was given the decision to either stay in Germany or go to Japan for a few years because of my fathers new job.
I didn't have much to lose so I decided to go abroad.
I lived in Niigata (marked on the population density map, first picture). It is a rural province of Japan which is said to produce the best rice in the world.
It is one of the poor provinces of japan, which is experiencing a harsh depopulation during to more jobs and much better wages in the regions around Tokyo and Osaka.
In the 2nd picture, you can see how Japan is divided. The gray provinces are rich, and the greeen ones are rural and rather "poor", it can be compared to modern east and west Germany.
People living in the gray provinces often make fun of those in the green ones, calling the green provinces "裏日本" (ura nihon) which translates to "the hidden side of japan", as nobody really cares about it.
Niigata might be poor compared to Tokyo, but in return crime, polluted air and wage slavery is not a thing there.
In the 3rd picture you can see Niigata's rice fields. In Niigata it doesn't matter where you go - as long as you are not in a city, you will be surrounded by rice fields.
The 4th picture is Mt. Yahiko, a very beautiful place to go hiking to, as there is also an old temple and a traditional village on its top.
I went to school normally and tried my best to somehow not fail the tests, had some friends and all in all life was good but also a lot more inconvenient compared to my life in Germany.
Those who care about the everyday life in rural japan of a gaijin teenager are welcome to ask me anything in this thread.
That being said, I did not take too many pictures as I was not on vacation. Also many of the pictures from my old iPod touch have been lost. Still I tried to gather as many pictures as possible from chat groups and my old Laptop to somehow show Bernd what life looked like in Niigata.
I remember one Russian woman who was a student at the Niigata University, I didn't talk to hair because I was afraid.
I also met really well educated black people who spoke almost perfect Japanese.
There was a group of foreigners who often met on saturday morning behind the campus to play football and they were kind enough to let me join, even though I was the only minor.
I was good friends with a korean dude who always joked how he got beaten in school and a french weeb, with long red hair who had the same name as me.
It felt like we were the only foreigners in the city, that's why we hung out together every now and then.
He works for one of the biggest german IT companies, that's how.
>How did you attend school?
How? I just went there with a school bus. It was a private High School, so we actually had to pay so I can go there. But that's normal since most schools are private there.
>Did you speak the language?
I learned it while I was there and I still speak it. In my first few months there I was freed from almost all the classes except for English, sports, Japanese, history and politics and I spend all the time studying the Japanese characters, as I couldn't even read the tasks in our exams.,
>Was school harder there than in Germany?
For me yes, of course. I had less than half a year to memorise ~1500 characters that all my classmates learned since they were six years old.
I did pic 1 related for many hours each day.
Pic 2 is some biology shit, we just had to learn everything by heart and then put the right answers in a multiple choice test.
In general, education there is more about learning stuff by heart, so it is definitely more time consuming than education in Germany.
But I wouldn't say that it is harder.
>what did you do if you didn't understand a question in a test?
I just skipped it. It wasn't a problem in the first months as every teacher understood that the 1000+ Chinese characters I didn't know were a problem I couldn't simply solve in a few days.
>how did you feel during the first tests?
I was very excited, especially for the history, biology, and Kanji exam I learned as much as I had never before in my life, and when I scored 60-70% in history and biology and got almost 100% in the Kanji exam and the teacher even praised me and showed my class how to properly write 帰 like I did, I almost died of being proud of myself. It felt great.
>the first classes?
I didn't understand anything and simply studied Kanji and words. Sometimes I played the impossible game on my iPod touch, which I was only allowed to take in the school because I needed an electronic dictionary.
>you had basic knowledge of japanese
I knew the two alphabets each consisting of 48 characters, and about 50 Kanji.
I knew all the grammar in theory and some words.
It was nothing, once I was there I understand absolutely 0% of what was being said.
Pics are pages from my big history book we used there.
It was the most based history book I ever had, interesting maps and beautiful photos on every page, and empty spaces filled with Bernd tire wisdom.
Definitely the nature, all the rice fields and all the chill and really kind people that work on them.
While in Tokyo people always look bored, exhausted or even angry, the people of rural Niigata are rather comparable to rural French or Italian people, who can randomly start a nice conversation on the street.
>how many years did you end up staying there?
I was there for almost two years, but since it was in my middle teenie days, it really did shape and change my character.
>Did you finish school there?
No, I made my Abitur in Deutschland.
>Did you ever return to Niigata or Japan?
Yes, after I turned 19 I went there again for 2-3 weeks to travel around the country because I hadn't seen anything yet except for Niigata and the airport of Tokyo.
There is this special Shinkansen ticket available only for foreigners with which you can travel anywhere for FREE for a given amount of time.
The pictures are me staying in internet cafes, a true Bernd tier place to rest and sleep.
Free unlimited drinks, food ordering form the PC without having to talk a single word, cheap to stay (about 10 euros a night), usually a huge Manga library and sometimes even showers for a few Yen.
>What did you do in your free time?
For the first six months I did not really have any free time because I had to study, study and study. After that, I slowly made some friends, started to go out with them but also bought myself a used 3DS in a second hand electronics store to play RPGs in Japanese to learn even more words.
I also lurked a lot on 2chan.
>Did you spend time in arcades?
No. I could never understand why people pay 100 Yen to press some buttons.
Also I have some problems with my eyes, so I have to go really close to screens and monitors to see something. Back in the days I was afraid of doing it in public because I had complexes.
>Did you go on any class trips and how where the girls in you class?
In winter we went to some mountains for skiing and some other time we went to Sendai with all the class for a weekend.
The girls were okay, only one was a Stacy-tire whore. All the others were really serious about studying and often were really shy. Interaction between boys and girls in my class almost didn't exist.
One approached me a lot, but she really wasn't my type.
I don't like Asian women in general.
>Are Japanese teenage girls as bad as German?
First of all, I do not believe that german teenage girls are any bad, except for the smartphone zombie bydlos of course.
The share of Stacies in Japan is much lower, but in the end they are all the same teenage girls. Cute, adorable, sometimes unaware of their cruelty towards Bernd.
This is very interesting and sounds like a great experience.
To my teenage self it would probably sound like hell. All the learning you had to do and the possibility of being even more of an outsider.
But now I am very envious. I wonder how I would have turned out if had to go through that challenge. The fact that you can read Japanese now is a nice bonus, too.
That sounds nice.
>Interaction between boys and girls in my class almost didn't exist.
That's crazy but sounds very Japanese.
I wish I had taken more pictures. I have 0 pictures from any of my school trips.
>Cute, adorable
My female classmates were mostly the type that wanted to appear very grown up and mature.
We even were divided by gender in our class.
Pic related is how we used to sit in our class room, first divided by gender and then sorted alphabetically.
It's also funny that for PE the girls had an extra dressing room while we boys had to change our clothes in the classroom. If you were slow after PE class to get dressed, you will have to do it while there are already girls in your room.
Really awkward and uncomfortable.
>How do you make friends?
You just find people with common interests, no?
I was friends with a guy from an oligarch family who really liked Pokémon and so did I, we went to the cinema to watch the latest Pokémon anime or just played against each other, talking about competitive strategies.
His mother was really weird, she liked telling me proudly the amount of money of the overpriced sweets and cakes she used to feed us whenever I came to his huge house.
I also had a female friend who was studying French, and sometimes I helped her with it and in return she helped me with Japanese. I even staid over at her house for two times, falling asleep on the same sofa, but Bernd is Bernd no matter where he goes, so nothing happened.
>Did they make the kyaa~ sound? lol
No, lol. We only had Majime-chans. (majime = serious).
>How does 2chan of today compare to back then. Did Japanese internet culture change like it did in the west?
2chan does not exist anymore, its domain was sold and is now 5ch.net.
It is not exactly dying, but it is not getting new posters because young people use only twitter, instagram and so on.
2ch was really big in the 00s, and there are many apps like "the 100 best legendary threads of 2chan" and I read stuff like that a lot while in bus or train but I also lurked, they have many funny racists words.
Like, Europe can be 汚州 instead of 欧州, the pronunciation is almost the same but the first means "dirty countries".
Pic 1 is a famous story that even was made into a TV drama, coming from 2ch of a guy telling how his life changed when he decided to lose his virginity to a prostitute and then got involved into Yakuza shit.
Pic 2 and 3 is the mascot of 2ch, Mona.
Pic 4 is a user announcing that he will be in the news and immediately after it Kyoani burned down.
>What was it like to return to germany?
It felt like being back to reality.
Nothing had changed while I was gone.
I also got really bad at talking and spelling german and I couldn't speak english at all anymore. I relearned it rather quick though.
>Would you like to go back to japan for more than a vacation if there was an opportunity?
Definitely, yes. I would absolutely love it if my future family could talk Japanese as well.
I myself feel homesick (or farsick?) to Niigata so I really hope that at some point in my life I can go back there for a while.
I am planning to live here in Germany though, I want to build my own house and I'm poor so it will be a lot of work and I don't know if it is possible to do everything - going back to Japan for 2-3 years AND building a house AND starting a family before I turn 30 y/o.
Obviously yes, as the boards of Japan are 99.99% Japanese.
The most popular boards are actually textboards and not imageboards, so something like memes do not exist in the Japanese internet as we know them and the word Miimu wasn't even known there until maybe two or three years ago, the "cool kids" on Twitter and Instagram would start to post Pepe and larp as a foreign meme pro.
Also, these textboards have a massive userbase and therefore a huge impact on society.
Tons of artificial words are created there and many of them will find their way into every day Japanese a few years later. The amount of internet slang in Japanese is incomparable big compared to the English one.
I'll give an example.
Pic related is the explanation how the Chinese character for grass, 草 (kusa), is now widely used for "lol", even by chads and stacies. Some people even say it irl but that's cringe.
笑う means to laugh, and its pronunciation is "warau".
In the early days of the internet, only 笑 (wara) was used as a smiling emoji replacement.
However this was annoying to type, so people just wrote a "w" at the end of a sentence, and the funnier something was, the more W's they would add at the end, pic 2 is comments on a random video.
Now, some people said "wwwwwwww" looks like a grassfield, so the chinese character for grass, plant is now the new "lol".
There are even expressions like 大草原不可避 which roughly translates to "The steppes are inevitable" and basically means ROFL, or LMFAO.
Words like this on fucked up ways are created every month, they come and go, some stay, others don't.
