I was born in a reasonably big city, and so I am not used to all of my neighbours knowing who I am and what I have been doing.
A few times after moving to Japan I have felt that it would be romantic to go and live in a rural area or small town with few other foreigners, where I would have to integrate with the local community, and speak only Japanese. But soon afterwards, I started to feel people’s eyes on me everywhere.
When living in Higashi-Matsuyama, I couldn’t sit in a restaurant without bumping into one of my elementary school students, who would run over to see what I was eating.
“Will-Sensei eats chocolate ice-cream in Gusto!” they would shout at me the next day in the playground. “Gusto! Gusto! Gusto!”
An even stranger thing happened to me when I was living in a small town in Kansai called Okubo. My next-door neighbour was an elderly Japanese lady who often came out into her garden to talk to me when she saw me leaving for work or coming back home. I didn’t speak much Japanese at the time and so we couldn’t communicate much more than by exchanging greetings. “Please work hard today!” she would shout as I left for work.
As I said, I had a romantic idea of life in a small town. And I didn’t have anything worth stealing. So I used to leave my house without locking the door.
One day I came back home from work. The lady next door wasn’t around. When I opened my door, I got a shock. The inside of my house seemed really clean. I entered the living room and I found that the dirty laundry that I had left scattered on the floor was now sitting in a neat pile, having been washed and dried.
I checked around the house. But there was nothing missing. Thieves don’t usually sneak into your house, steal some jewellery, and then do your laundry as an apology. The only explanation was that the elderly lady next door had come into my house when I was at work, cleaned up and done the laundry, and then gone home again.
Well what would you have done? I wasn’t sure whether I should say, “Thank you,” or “Please don’t sneak into my house again, scary lady!” I’m sure in her mind she was being very helpful. She saw a young, single man living far from his mother and thought that he couldn’t be keeping his house clean or properly taking care of his laundry. And in this she was certainly not wrong.
I said “Thank you,” to the lady, and bought her a little gift. But I also asked her not to come into my house again, and I started locking my door. I was even careful to close the curtains. Suddenly in Okubo the eyes were following me everywhere.
I now live in Tokyo where everyone ignores everyone else. Neighbours that I have been living amongst for ten years would probably struggle to recognise my face. And that has its good side as well as its bad side.
Vocabulary:
reasonably big – fairly big; big, but not very big
rural – in the countryside
to integrate – to join and become a unit
laundry – clothes which need to be washed, or have just been washed
a pile – a collection of things placed one on top of the other
to sneak somewhere – to go somewhere secretly, or quietly and while trying to avoid being caught
to struggle to do something – to find it difficult to do something
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