A Year in Japan and 13 Years to Make Sense of It

I got real tired of my town when I was 15.  I was tired of it before that, but at 15, I found a way out that my family and I both approved of: I was taking a year abroad.  I got caught smoking weed and drinking in junior high and with the best intentions, my mom worked over-time to send me to a private Catholic school.  I had a question on one of my religion tests that was true or false: if you are a practicing homosexual you are going to hell.  What a fucking dilemma.  Do I take one for the team and get this one wrong by standing by my morals, or get one for sure right on a test I'm otherwise not fully confident of?  True.  Fuck you school. 

That was the beginning.  The football coach I had for history the second year was the last straw for me.  He gave me a C on an assignment we were given that was supposed to be creative: we write a letter from a war trench, and make it look like it was dug up after the war.  I did that and I did a great job.  I burned the sides of the paper (learned to do this prior to writing the paper because if you burn too far it deletes your work).  I buried the paper in dirt.  It was authentic.  I was proud.  I got a C, and was a shown a paper a classmate did as a comparison for what an A looks like.  It was typed in cursive, printed on store bought paper made to look old.  My blood boiled.  I asked the teacher, whom we called Coach as his request, who he imagined paid for that paper, or drove to the store to get it, or bought the printer it was printed on. I asked him how involved that student even had the potential of being given the final product.  I explained to him my efforts and was awarded with… a B.  He couldn’t give me an A from a C with no new work without getting in trouble, I knew that, but he said he liked a girl who fought for what she wanted. 

I was done.  I was saving everything from my afterschool job at a dry-cleaners, that I paid rich kids to drive me to in cars gifted to them, to take a year abroad.  Mind you, I appreciate how out of touch this is.  And that is exactly what was so maddening.  I was a privileged student, in a privileged situation, in an overall upper-class town.  If this was how life felt to me, I was becoming convinced we’re all fucked.  I got into Rotary’s program where they send you to another country for a year.  You get to pick your top three countries, but they send you where they send you.  It was perfect. Get me away from here, far away, doesn’t matter where, let me understand what life it like outside this preppy little town. 

I landed in Japan.  Safe, different, perfect.  Call me ignorant, I was, but I was going to a city, so I thought it would look like L.A.  I was wrong; they were all Japanese.  We don’t have that here and somehow, I hadn’t conceived of it. An entire city of one single race. I was in Morioka, a city in northern Japan on the main island.  Most people had never seen a non-Japanese person except for on TV.  So, for the first three months, it was fantastic.  It was like what I imagined being a movie star felt like, knowing very little of what is going on around you, and getting lots of attention and gratitude for, just existing there.  People wanted to take pictures with me, they gave presents, lots of keychains, I don’t know why.  They thanked me.  For doing, jack shit.  Then the experience goes from feeling like you’re famous to feeling like you’re a zoo animal.

You’re with your host family who doesn’t speak English and you need tampons.  They write down directions to a convenience store after you’ve charaded a bleeding vagina to your host mother because you don’t know the word for period, your pocket dictionary has a different definition, and the word “menstruate” is evading you.   You’re in the store and you’re not sure if it’s a cultural weirdness about tampons they’re staring at you for because they generally only use pads, or just because you’re white.  You’re on the public bus to school and you sit in the back and half, half of the passengers, are turned around staring at you.  On a good day it’s entertaining, on a bad day it’s humiliating.

Basically, the honeymoon dies after three months. A recognition presents itself after three months that although you are being stared at, you are completely unseen. I don’t advise anyone send their child anywhere longer than three months unless you can readily communicate with them.  Or should you?  Is it even possible to be anywhere in the world without immediate connection to home?  I try to imagine what it would be like today, and it would be so completely different, it’s not even comparable.  I had access to a computer with an English keyboard only at an internet café with limited hours, which I did not find till I was there for over four months. First contact.

I hit a point during the winter where I was feeling completely alone and unmotivated.  I learned from another exchange student that there was a way to call home using phone cards bought at the convenience stores. For those of you who want to judge me for not catching on to this sooner, do it, but also, this shit was written in Kanji and I was 16.  So, I called home for the first time after six months and my little brother answered the phone.  And: he sounded like a grown man.  I thought I had the wrong number.  I said, “Ummm, hi, I’m calling for, um, for my mom… I guess I have the wrong number”, and my brother goes, “What’s up B?” In the stoner-I’ve-been-dating-for-six-months-and-have-long-hair-now voice that you might expect from a freshman in Californian.  I started to cry.  What had I missed?  What had I done?  Not only had I failed any new friendships, I was missing out on the ones I cared about.  How could my little brother with a bowl cut have long hair and a girlfriend and not sound like the child he was?  I had not considered the fact that there was anything to miss at home. 

But then I talked to my mom, who was growing her business, busy, and traveling, and I decided we are all missing out on things regardless of what we are doing, so whatever. 

Bit of a tangent: can we all give it up to single parents?  I am too much for one person, we all are growing up, so thank them for putting up with you.  I do by the way, have a father who loves me. We just can’t figure out how to talk regularly, so here I want to thank my mom. 

They give training papers to parents of exchange students.  I am told it is adjusted for the modern world a little better now, but at the time all it said was tell ‘em to stick it out.  That’s what matters most. Tell them they will regret it the rest of their lives if they don’t finish the whole year.  I told my mom horror stories, and she said, “Glad you’re having fun, keep it up.” 

So I have that first, big, meaningful, conversation with home, and my family is busy, but happy to hear from me.  I cried the rest of the day.  It was both inspiring and depressing, to just speak and be understood without extra effort or attempts at translation, and then be just as easily ignored.  It was the taste of home I needed. 

At that point, I had been with my second host family for maybe a month.  The parents owned a bar and the dad hit the kids.  So, what do I do?  What would you do at 16?  I decided to protect my siblings, which in my mind, meant keeping silent what the dad does when the dog barks too loud.  After two months, I talked to an English teacher at the school I went to about it. “Hypothetically,” I say,” what would happen if a dad hit his daughters here?”  And you learn that it is frowned upon, but is ultimately no big D.  I weigh my options: I either tell Rotary that this guy hits his girls and I can’t handle it, or I fit in and love my temporary siblings, who won’t speak to me by the way, and get through the next two months.  Another thing you’re taught before you go is that your understandings come from your culture, but that does not mean they are right.  So, I start to play games with myself where I try on ideas like maybe violence and alcohol abuse aren’t real problems.

We may feel more powerless around 16 than we do in most of our lives, regardless of what country and what circumstances we find ourselves in.  You have a sense at that point of what is right and what isn’t, but you are likely reliant on other’s financials, or approval and support in one way or another, to see you through.  It’s a terribly awkward time of deciding when to stand your ground and when to respect the wishes of the people you are dependent on.  So, I stay and just do what she says when my older host sister tells me to go to my room and lock the door when the dad’s upset.  He never hit me, this is their distress that I’m doing nothing but adding to by being a silent bystander, and it’s killing me, but anything I can think to do would only make their situation worse or at the least embarrass them as far as I’m able to tell.  And isn’t that fucked that we be made embarrassed by the fact that we’re being abused.  I mean my siblings not me.  I understood that they didn’t talk to me because they were shy and embarrassed, but how am I to know, we didn’t talk, just exchanged glances that I’m sure we both put words to and who knows how different they were. 

So here I am, seven months deep, and hardly speak any Japanese because no one will fucking talk to me.  Everyone around me is too excited or too shy and now I’m feeling terribly lonely and guilty, and I don’t know how to make friends.  And it’s winter.  Never lived where it snowed.  It snows there, and you’re expected to wear loafers with little heels and a skirt.  They have a different winter uniform but it’s still loafers and a skirt.  I’m not used to this, I think it’s fucked, but its mildly fun because I’d never worn skirts before and there I was, with all the school girls of Japan, freezing my ass off, and it was funny.

My third host family has six kids.  Very unusual in Japan, but I put on my application that I was used to being in a house full of kids.  They were great because my host mom would talk to me, and the six-year-old, Keika, would too.  The rest of them did not. 

A side note that Keika is the only name I remember from that year.  It’s not that I didn’t know people’s names, I just can’t, for the life of me, remember them now. 

My host mom would shovel the snow so the car could get out every morning at 4:30 am.  Most days, they would go to a 5 am prayer and meditation service.  After the morning service, my host mom would walk outside with my host dad as he got in the car to leave for work, follow him out as he pulled away, and bow in the middle of the street until his car was out of sight.

As you might imagine, my thought was, “Well this is fucking interesting.”  I talked to her about it and she laughed.  They constantly had exchange students living with them and she said every girl they’d had asked her about it, questioned why, and questioned her comfort with it.  She said she’s learned a lot about how, especially Westerners, think about marriage, but for her, she liked knowing what was expected of her.  She said it’s like having a well-defined job and team.  You do your part, I’ll do mine.  She said we all rely on each other and go further when we accept that and have defined roles and clear expectations.  She liked how well it functioned and loved that she got to stay home and spend so much time with her family.

Other than my occasional conversations with my host mom, and my six-year-old host sister being oddly bossy with me and showing me off at the playground like a new toy, and me not knowing how to respond to it, but enjoying the attention in a way I knew wasn’t healthy, I was not making any friends and not talking to anyone but the two other exchange students in the city I was in.  I loved them, but they were both going through similar disillusionment so it wasn’t exactly a cure.  I decided I was losing my mind for real and needed to go home before I lost it for good.  I don’t know how many of you reading this have experienced that feeling, but it is utterly terrifying.  You see your touch with reality slipping, and you try to grab it, rein it in, and there is just less and less there to hold onto.  It’s like thread slipping through your fingers, and then you think these metaphors and it's only affirmation your mind be leaving you, because thinking in poetry is not you, you’re just going nuts.

Admitting you need help when you are proud enough to raise your own money and get on a plane alone for the first time to do this, postponed this call longer than it should have, but I had determined I might die.  I didn’t know of what, but there was something scary around the corner and I knew I needed help.  I called home crying, saying I needed to come home.  I called home crying again.  I don’t do that shit by the way.  I didn’t understand why this wasn’t a red flag and acted upon immediately.  But all I got were things like, “Honey, imagine your problems aren’t real, don’t you feel better now?  Just let go for a minute, see how your body responds, and then stay there.”  Thanks a lot 1960’s for teaching my parents to lose touch with reality to experience freedom.  Anyway, it wasn’t what I needed.  I needed a plane ticket.  I am afraid for my safety, I do not trust myself, but I’m not clear what I’m afraid of doing, I just feel like there’s no logic to base my choices on at this point, and I need to come home and get sane again.  “Just stick it out, you will be proud of yourself when it’s over, just a few more months, you’re doing great kid.” 

When I wasn’t able to rally support for my decision from home, I went to Rotary and I told them it was absolutely necessary that I go home.  And they said,” No.”  I said, “Give me my plane ticket.”  They said, ”No.”  In hindsight, I can see different tactics I could have used, but that is the beauty of being oh so much older and wiser.  At the time, I determined there was no longer any use being reasonable because no one respected me.  So, I decided to get myself kicked out of the program.  You can’t drink as an exchange student, although they throw a doozy on you in Japan and insist you drink at the Rotary meetings, but I knew there was a limit, so I started drinking and staying out late, ditching school.  Came into school after two weeks, ditched my first two classes, brought a half-consumed bottle of vodka with me, and called in a meeting with an English teacher there.  Finally, I was going to get sent home. 

He laughed at me. Told me I was fine. I pulled the bottle of vodka out of my school bag, I told him I had a problem, I told him I needed to go home.  He saw right through my plan and thought it was somehow funny.  That a strategy like this, insanely, meant I’m still mentally fit.  I told him I needed my plane ticket and that I didn’t speak enough Japanese to make it clear to Rotary, and that he did, and I needed his help.  He said that’s my job.  I told him I had done it and it didn’t work.  He said he needed to go to class, that I would get used to life here. 

I started drinking like an asshole after that.  I came to school most of the time because I felt enormously guilty for ditching, but no one cared or noticed.  I left school when I got mad, just walked out.  Literally, zero repercussions.  No one said anything to me.  Not a one, single, I noticed you weren’t here.  I would go to the park and drink.  One of the exchange students who was there, one of my two friends, started dating a guy who owned a bar.  So, we hung out there a lot.  I think you might see where this is going.  Skip ahead if you must, I do sometimes when I get to these parts.

I fell asleep in a booth at that bar one night… alright, I passed out, I was shit housed.  But it also felt like a comfortable place to be. We hung out there outside of business hours and it felt like a relaxing safe place to just be lost.  There was a group of guys there from Italy that showed up after we’d been drinking.  First time we’d seen other foreigners in that city.  We were so excited.  But they didn’t speak English so the excitement was short lived.  I pass out, they carried me up to their hotel room across the street.  My friends, who were at the bar, come back to the booth and I’m not there, they have the boyfriend/bar-owner help them ask the other people around, and they tell them what they saw.  They go to the hotel, front desk tells them the room, they find me passed out naked.  All I remember from that was a wooden screen and the silhouette of a naked man.  I wake up crying at my friend’s host mom’s house.  I come out of the room crying, telling them I had a terrible dream I was raped.  They tell me it wasn’t a dream, that’s what their hotel room looked like.

I had never dated.  I didn’t know what the f this meant.  Was I pregnant?  That’s what it means isn’t it?  I need to go to a doctor.  Where is a doctor’s office?  Where is the hospital?  I have no clue.  I’m afraid to tell my host mom so I ask my friend who was dating the bartender, “ask your host mom for me, see if she can help.”  Host mom says, “No.”  She says, ”In Japan you need to be with a guardian to see a doctor, but I don’t want to get involved or in trouble with Rotary for doing that.”  I tell Rotary a few weeks later, I tell them I need to see a doctor, I might be pregnant or have an STD, I need to go to a doctor.  They laugh at me. They sit there; and they laugh at me.  They tell me this is how it works: You might be pregnant, but you won’t show for three months, and you will be home at that point, and can navigate it then.  They tell me I might have an STD, but if I do, then I do, and going to a doctor now, or later, will not change that.  They tell me I do need to have a guardian with me to see a doctor, and they are not able to provide that. 

I don’t tell my host mom or my mom, because it is too humiliating to share with the people who took care of me, how badly I’d fucked up.  I decide, for the second time, that given my resources, drinking heavily, is my best bet.  I decide I need to abort this possibility of a baby.  I start smoking cigarettes.  I still do this sometimes, when I’m upset.  I am as I write this.  I used to take my parents cigarettes when I was a kid, put them in their nicotine patch box, and put flash cards with facts about smoking in them.  What an asshole I was.

So, I drink and I smoke, and I make it through the next three months.  I make it back to Seattle and miss my connecting flight to LA because the guy in customs forgot to stamp my passport while we were chatting and then went on a break immediately after so I had to go back through.  My baggage was too heavy leaving Japan so I moved some things onto my “carryon”.  I didn’t actually have a carryon bag so they gave me a heavy-duty trash bag.  So, there I was in Seattle with my trash bag and no way to tell my family who was picking me up in LA, who I hadn’t seen in a year, that I was going to be four hours late.  I sat there, and all I could think was, “God, there are so many foreigners here!” and “Jesus, these people look like aliens.” and, “How are people so tall!” And I cried.  I sat there with my trash bag and cried, surrounded by giant aliens.

An enormously kind security guard let me use her personal cell phone to call my mom. 

I got home July first.  WELCOME BACK TO AMERICA.  Fucking flags everywhere.  My mind was twisted and I was used to drinking too much so I would get drunk and only speak Japanese to my friends.  I don’t think they would have had patience for me but it was senior year and we were discovering alcohol so it didn’t matter a great deal.

I told my mom I was afraid I was pregnant and might have STDs and wanted to get tested and she took me to a doctor who was a judgmental bitch, but no to both so yay for that.

I was raped a second time walking home from a party I never should have gone to not two months after getting home.  I didn’t tell anyone because I knew I was a mess and was embarrassed until I found out about him doing the same thing to a younger girl at my school. I talked to her about it, I guess we talked, I tried to and she burst into tears immediately when I said his name and ran away.  I turned him in six months after it happened and the investigation went on for about a year but there was no evidence at that point and I refused to wear a wire, so it ended.

So, here I am 13 years later.  I told Rotary here about it three years ago, with some suggestions about how to train and enable exchange students to better take care of themselves and have the resources they need.  Like make it policy to show them where the hospital is and how to access it.  And have a woman who they can speak to there, even in countries who only allow men in Rotary, like Japan.  And maybe alert students that some things are a problem regardless of culture, and teach them to speak up about them.

I am working on my associate's degree online, and last week I was walking home from a softball game, thinking about the homework I needed to do, and was just overcome with rage. I wondered, for possibly the first time ever, what my life would look like if I hadn’t had that experience in Japan.  If I had had support when I needed it, if I had managed to get myself home halfway through. 

I got into eight colleges but was too lost to go.  What if I had gotten home before the real tragedy, gotten help, and gone to college?  What if, instead of spending 13 years trying to heal from feeling trapped I had been learning how to contribute to society?  Trauma forces a stupid selfishness, you can’t focus on anything else. 

Who would I be now?  What would my relationships look like?  What would my fears be?  What would my aspirations be beyond just to feel like myself again?

And it occurs to me, as I feel the giant rubber band knot in my throat that forms with these questions, how many people, under so many different circumstances, are trapped and abused instead of supported.  How many people are ignored instead of heard.  Particularly during those beautifully formative years.  It also occurs to me that my experience is common and repeated for a lot of people even though it was unusual and temporary for me.  It occurs to me how unfair that is and how unfair it is that victims of abuse experience so much shame in sharing that fact.  It occurs to me that I am not nearly as alone in this experience as I feel.

People are generally impressed if they learn I spent a year in Japan.  Sometimes this strikes me as funny, and sometimes it makes me sad.  I wish we were less taken with, or scared by, things we consider exotic.  If my classmates, and host siblings, and the general-public, weren’t so giddy with the fact that I was foreign, we could have, I don’t know, had a conversation.  There was so much enthusiasm, and it was a block for connection instead of a catalyst. 

If when I had come home people weren’t so determined to make my year away a positive thing I could have been heard and healed faster. There is a profound romanticization of "life abroad," and the same cultural fascination that got me a lot of looks and little conversation when I got to Japan was getting my a lot of eye-rolls at home. Try to tell someone your year as an exchange student was more challenging than it was beneficial and see the wrath that awaits.  Suddenly they know more than you about how fantastic your experience was, and how lucky you are, when they haven’t left your town of 8,000.  Life is just life, regardless of location.  Some years are mostly enjoyable, and some years are mostly hard. 

I think what upsets me most is not actually how much that experience shaped me, or even how long it’s taken to feel semi-normal again, but how I do not know anyone personally who is open about having been raped.  I would like the subject of abuse of all kinds to not be taboo.  If it relates to the conversation, I would like people to be able to casually mention their experience without it making everyone look down at their feet and stop talking.  Why is it still so hard to talk about these things that have been part of the human experience since the beginning of time?  It shouldn’t be.  I would like us to acknowledge the existence of abuse so that we have a chance to understand it, how it happens, how to get out, and how to make sense of it.

That’s all I’ve got.  Adios… a Spanish-speaking country would have made a lot more sense for me. Oh well. 

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Review

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This is an astonishingly raw, brave, and powerful memoir that confronts trauma, isolation, and resilience with unflinching honesty. It is more than a story—it’s a deeply personal excavation of what happens when vulnerability is met with neglect, cultural misunderstandings, and systemic failure. The narrative seamlessly blends humor, anger, sadness, and reflection, offering readers an intimate look at how trauma shapes identity, resilience, and healing over time.

The central theme of this piece is the long shadow of trauma and the failures of systems meant to protect and support. This story unpacks how institutions—whether they are international exchange programs, schools, or social norms—often fall short, leaving victims isolated and unsupported.

Subthemes enrich the narrative, including cultural alienation and isolation, powerlessness in youth, the stigma of sexual assault, the burden of healing alone, and misunderstood experiences.

The emotional tone is unapologetically raw, reflective, and darkly humorous. There’s an honest bitterness that seeps through at times, especially when reflecting on cultural naivety, institutional failures, and the profound loneliness of being unheard. However, what makes the tone especially powerful is its authenticity—it doesn't try to soften the discomfort or sanitize the messy parts.

The humor, though often dark, serves a dual purpose. It acts as a shield, protecting both the author and the reader from the unbearable weight of the trauma. It also becomes a coping mechanism, showcasing resilience and the capacity to find absurdity in pain.

The author refuses to dilute their experiences for the reader’s comfort, making the narrative both courageous and deeply moving. Moments of sharp, self-deprecating humor provide much-needed relief and showcase emotional intelligence and resilience after trauma. The profound sense of being trapped—emotionally, physically, and culturally—during formative years communicates a complex reflection on powerlessness. The critique of cultural romanticization and institutional failures is potent and necessary.

This is an extraordinary piece of writing—brave, unfiltered, and devastating in its honesty. It doesn’t just tell a story of survival; it challenges the reader to confront uncomfortable truths about trauma, systemic neglect, and cultural alienation.