why indeed? anime ? language? why did I ever come and live her?

before my university years the only thing I know about Japan, is that it was the country that totured the filipino people during the world war ii. they were the one who held the bataan march that killed hundreds of filipino. and of course,the war stories I heard from my grandma, which the only thing I remembered was how they hide in the mountains of Mindanao and would watch the band of japanese soldiers, accdg to her they would not go deeper into the wild cause they are afraid of leeches ( im not sure if this was true ).

when I was in high school, a cousin who is around 8 years older than me came to japan as an entertainer. i never knew what an entertainer was, she love to dance so i thought she might be a dancer, well she was. when she comes home, she sometimes have visitors - girls she
worked with - and they would talked about “lapad” ( yen ) and their exploits with their customers.
by then, I thought Japan is a country full of bars - well it still is.

during that time, i already watched a lot of anime but I did not know they were original in japanese. it was not during my university years, that my curiousity of the country got pricked. during my sophomore year, we had to get a g.e. subject that is not so demanding. I wanted to take the french class but the teacher was a known terror, and I don’t want that to add more pressure to my heavy class schedule already. then a japanese class was open, and by fate it fits our schedule perfectly. it was fun. my teacher was prof. ballescas, a monbusho grantee and the first filipino and first female to teach at Tsukuba University in Chiba. it is because of this class, that we met the japanese consulate of cebu ( the whole class had lunch with him too ), liz and I were seriously practicing our chopstick skill, trying to pick grains of rice. it was my first encounter with hiragana and katakana, but coming to japan never crossed my mind.

it was not until I joined the worked force that my interest with japan bloomed. working for a japanese firm was also a big influenced. i met people who have been in and out of japan, who loves jpop, jrock and most of all like the japanese anime. it was actually because of anime thati finally delve more into japanese history, especially samurai, ninja and little by little I become obsesses to come to japan and see all of it. my senpai( senior colleagues) already warn me about what to expect in japan and not to believe on what I saw on anime but still I was hoping that somehow just a little even just a little bit of it was true. sadly, anime’s are exaggerated. some are historically based, but most of the time it is just an exaggeration. samurai and ninjas
are things of the past. and then the language, i was really intrigued and interested to learn more of it. and to that best is to actually live here and listen and talk to the natives.

three years ago, i got disappointed with the company I was working with. I felt that we just disposable commodities and still i got a crappy salary. so i decided to throw it all away and come to japan to earn more , even though my current salary is still crappy compared to that of a japanese I can still live comfortably. so now am here, with a crappy company and a crappy salary.. yipeee..

am not sure where i will be going next but i think for the time being i think i’ll be staying here for now

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Blog365, Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.