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Finding common ground in Japan
Betsy Herzog left Cullowhee last summer for a year in Japan with the idea she’d discover a brand new world.
That expectation hasn’t exactly panned out, and, so far at least, Betsy’s been noticing as many similarities as differences.
“I am continually surprised that this town reminds me of my home in Cullowhee even though it is literally a world away,” Betsy said in an e-mail she sent several weeks ago.
Betsy, who left Smoky Mountain High School after her sophomore year to explore Durham and the North Carolina School of Science and Math, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last May and has been teaching English at a rural Japanese high school for the past six months.
She found out about the program through a career counselor at UNC as she was looking for an experience that would pay her to spend time in another country.
 Cullowhee’s Betsy Herzog, who is spending a year in Japan teaching English to high school students, will share her experiences with Sylva Herald readers through a series of guest columns. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who’s set to enter graduate school there in August, Betsy is the daughter of Western Carolina University professors Hal and Mary Jean Herzog. She has a twin sister, Katie, who graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and now lives in Portland, Ore., and a brother, Adam, who is in nursing school at East Tennessee State University.
“My main objective was to travel; the destination wasn’t important to me. Before I left my knowledge of Japan was limited to sushi, samurai films, and that Styx song about “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto,” Besty said. “This is one of the few programs in the world that pay for the teachers to fly over. Once I found that out, I was sold.”
Though she’s there to teach English, Betsy’s found herself in a language-immersion program outside her classroom. She’s the only non-Japanese person in her town, a fact she describes as “a mixed bag that’s both bizarre and wonderful.” She’s learned conversational Japanese and can talk with co-workers, but because the language has three alphabets, it’s particularly difficult to read.
“I am functionally illiterate, which is a painfully disorienting experience,” she said. “But I (usually) love the food, I have a handful of good friends, and I am going to the beaches of the Philippines in three weeks, so there isn’t too much to complain about.”
Betsy lives in Bizen, a rural community that she says has more in common with Cullowhee than Tokyo. At 30,000, the population is roughly equivalent to that of Jackson County, though it’s eight times more crowded. The hills and valleys around her village total only 133 square kilometers compared to Jackson’s 1,281 square kilometers, she said. Consequently everything – from houses and roads to loaves of bread and tubes of toothpaste – is smaller. That includes the people. Betsy, who we would consider petite at 5 feet 4 inches and size four blue jeans, dwarfs her students and colleagues and is what she says Japanese saleswomen “snickeringly call a ‘large-large.’”
This space issue carries over into the schools where she teaches. Instead of every teacher having a classroom, as is typical here, all the teachers have desks crammed into one large office. There are no school buses; instead students ride their bicycles or take the train.
Those are the types of differences Betsy expected; what’s surprised her has been the similarities.
“The way my students behave reminds me of my days at Smoky Mountain High,” she said. “They seem to attend class in order to catch up on their social networks and their sleep. While there are no lockers to get slammed into, yesterday I saw two third-year bullies lift an unsuspecting first-year boy into a garbage can. There are the same cliques, gossip and mischief that are a rite of passage for any American student. Girls pull their uniform skirts up to scandalous lengths, and I was amazed to see that teachers use the same ‘fingertip rule’ as they did at Smoky Mountain to gauge respectability.”
Betsy’s surroundings remind her of home, too.
“Riding the train and seeing the sun setting over the mountains gives me the strong sense of driving through Caney Fork, and I feel as far away from the pulsing neon and subway crowds of Tokyo as Cullowhee does from Los Angeles,” she writes. “Busy moms and dads dropping children off in the school parking lot recall the traffic circles of my childhood: first at Camp Lab, then Cullowhee Valley, and finally Smoky Mountain.”
The coming of autumn triggered memories for her as well, though the season came a little later than it does in our mountains.
“This November, the leaves changed suddenly and dramatically, painting the hills in flames of color that made me think of driving through the Blue Ridge Parkway every September,” she wrote. “The half-dozen fly fishermen who dotted the banks of the Asahi Gawa gave me a sudden and breathtaking nostalgia for the upper Tuckaseigee.”
The likenesses Betsy is finding to the hills of home are softening the sense of isolation she anticipated when she began her journey.
“It’s thrilling that lives here can hold truths that are so similar to those in Western North Carolina,” she writes. “My reverie is always broken by the quiet rumble of the bullet train slipping through the hills (another difference: public transportation), and I am glad that I can be a world away and still feel at home.”
Back when I was a student at Western Carolina University, a campus philosopher once asked me if Cullowhee was like Chicago. Since I’d never been to Chicago, I didn’t have an answer for him. On the other hand, if someone asked me now if Jackson County is like Japan, I could say “sort of,” based on Betsy’s newsy e-mails.
Stay tuned for more information about Betsy’s Japanese journey. She plans to share her experiences – both familiar and exotic – through a series of guest columns that will appear on a monthly basis.
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