We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.

—Madeleine L'Engle


I have been a stranger in a strange land.
—Moses

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I thought today we'd talk a little about culture shock and reverse culture shock, the two big enemies of people who live abroad for any length of time. I imagine you've all heard the terms before, but if you haven't then culture shock is basically where things in a new culture are different enough that they cause you to reject the place and want to go home. And reverse culture shock is, well, the reverse, for people who have lived abroad a number of years and return to their home country.

Culture shock includes two parts. First there is noticing differences between the new culture and one's home culture. Second is feeling a sense of surprise or shock over these differences, a dislike, and ultimately rejecting them. This then usually leads to homesickness and, if the option is open to them, running home for many people. Usually it follows a period of a few weeks to a few months where the person is just completely in love with the country, called the "Honeymoon Period". The Honeymoon Period is nice, but it invariably ends and then spirals into the low of culture shock for many.

^{Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay}

I never experienced culture shock when I moved to Japan long ago. I certainly experienced the first part of it: I noticed countless differences. But I never moved on to the second part and never experienced any dislike or rejection of the way Japan does these things.

Is this because I'm more open minded than a lot of people? I suppose it could be. Another factor may have been that I was already a blogger (and had been blogging for eight years by that point) and had started a new blog just for my Japan adventure—called, originally enough, David in Japan—where I would blog daily about these culture differences. I usually would also research a bit into why American and Japan do these things differently in order to more fully explain the difference. Doing this blogging may have helped me better process the differences and thus avoid culture shock.

I see it in other people all the time. One of my many jobs is a culture trainer (the exact title) at some of the nearby car companies. We have Mitsubishi in my city and Toyota just to the north. Honda an hours train ride that way. And a few others. All these companies send at least a few employees overseas for 3-5 years, usually at the beginning of their career when their kids are still young or before they even have kids. Yeah yeah, sounds nuts, but sending young employees somewhere else for a while is a pretty normal thing in Japan.

But I digress. Point is, I keep in contact with a lot of these guys after they go overseas and I hear about their struggles. Then a few years later when they come back, I see as the reverse culture shock hits them (more on what this is below). I also see a lot of newly arriving foreigners to Japan experience culture shock. Sometimes severe culture shock. Usually women are hit harder, but it seems to happen to most people. A surprisingly large number of them give in to it and move back home without ever telling their job about it. Yeah, there is some immaturity there, but newly arriving foreigners are often pretty young.

Sometime after I had been in Japan several years, I stopped noticing so many new things. I couldn't say when this was—5 years? 10 years? I don't know—but it did happen eventually. The Japanese way of things had become the normal way for me. I do still run into differences that I wasn't previously aware of sometimes, but the times this happens are much more rare than they once were, and when they do happen it feels more like learning about the way things are as opposed to learning about how this country does things differently from my home country.

^SOURCE

Usually this is the point where reverse culture shock clicks in. People move back home, are completely shocked by the return to their home culture, and want nothing more than to return to their adopted culture where things make sense. Now granted, this also takes a few weeks to a few months to hit, after the high of returning home wears off. This is just as common as culture shock. I've seen it happen a lot with Japanese folks returning to Japan after living abroad a number of years and I've heard about many cases of it happening with expats who return to their home country after living here for a number of years. I suppose another factor in reverse culture shock is that one's home culture has changed. It always does, as young people keep pushing the culture in a new direction; when we are living in a place we can watch the slow change happen and adapt to it, but when we have been away from a place for many years, all these changes are probably pretty jarring: home is no longer the same home that you remember. Cue the Rip Van Winkle reference (Japan has their own version of this folktale, called Urashima Taro).

Would I experience reverse culture shock if I moved back to the US? I don't know. Maybe? I'm not really planning on moving back to the US so this is a question I may never be able to answer. I have, however, encountered hints of this in my visits to see my family. I notice so many differences now when I visit, this time from the Japanese perspective. An added twist this time is after I notice the difference my memory usually kicks in and I think Oh yeah... I remember they do it this way here. It's always interesting to me how my sense of normal has changed over the years and how the American way of doing many things now seems strange and unusual in a great many cases. I wonder if @koto-art has noticed this effect at all on her visits home to Japan or @tarazkp on his trips home to Oz?

Anyway, that's all I got for you today. No big conclusions, just an exploration of this phenomenon.

Have any of the rest of you ever experienced culture shock or reverse culture shock? If so, how did you overcome it?

(title image from this photo by meguraw645 from Pixabay)

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.