From Tokyo to Bakersfield

You normally do not think your hometown is a funny place.

Where you were born is all you know until you move out one day, and you normally love your hometown.

For some reason, I didn't.

Not that I hated Tokyo, but I was never comfortable. I didn't quite fit in.

My friends constantly told me I was a bit strange, or different. As I was just being myself, I didn't know how I was strange or different, but that's what they told me.

There are number of desirable attributes for a desirable young girl there. Dressing in a certain way, making a hair style in a certain way, taking about the TV program in a certain way, and being modest and shy in a certain way, speaking to boys in a certain way, etc.

I thought they were all non-sense and ignored most of them. That seemed have made me a "different" girl who was never popular among boys in school.

So it was such a relief when I went to Bakersfield, California to attend Bakersfield College there and lived in the dorm, and the new friends in the girls dorm told me I was not strange at all.

To be "different" in US, you have to be acutely different from the crowd, not just ignoring the desirable attributes.

It is such an irony that I am a pure Japanese with a typical Japanese look, and yet I was a strange girl in Japan and not in US. At that time my English was much poorer, but still I was not considered "different".

That was the first time ever in my life not being "strange". I thought I finally found a place I can be just myself. I loved my friends in Bakersfield, and I loved my teachers who were all great.

Many years after living outside Japan, I discovered Tokyo was rather a funny place and a bit strange. My other friends who visited Tokyo for the first time tend to have a similar impression. No wonder I was called "strange" at that time.

The study itself was tough. With limited reading and writing English skills, attending normal college classes was a real challenge. It took me two hours to read a page of psychology book which I had to read 20 pages a week.

So I spent all my waking time to read textbooks of all the classes I took. If I do not read them in advance, I could not understand what the professors were saying in the class. My hearing skill was not so good, and the teachers were from all over the US and each had a different accent.

Until I finish high school in Japan, I never really studied. I was a stupid young girl who thought not studying was cool. Somehow I managed above the average scores without studying much, so I continued not studying except for the few days before the term exams.

But now, if I don't study every waking minute, I could not catch up. So all I did was reading, reading, and reading even when my friends were out having fun over the weekends.

Because I finally learned how to study, I start doing very well. In the first term, I got A in every class.

I remember very touching moment with Dr. Whitehouse who was a professor of Introduction of Psychology.

He announced that the last exam and essay paper were required only for those score was not confirmed by the previous exams. Then he announced the students' name who already earned A and said they do not have to take the last exam. My name was in it.

But I was going to major in Psychology and liked his class, so I prepared the paper and came to take the exam well prepared.

Dr. Whitehouse realised that I was there, and he handed me the exam paper and said "Thank you" to me personally.

There were no teachers who ever thanked me for taking an exam. That was one glorious moment in Bakersfield.