I’m moving to Japan, ten years after I moved to China.

I guess I should write something about it, and there are similarities: in both countries for three years, housing provided, and the option of staying in my foreign enclave if I so choose.

Differences? This career has a future, ESL didn’t. I’m married, with a child. No internet filter, no widespread censorship and while I know views of World War 2 differ over there, at least I have the option of googling different ideas.

Another similarity: language learning.

I’ve been studying Japanese in preparation for my move. In hindsight, I’m glad I studied Chinese, as it’s prepared me for learning the counterpart across the Yellow Sea, and in some unexpected ways beyond Kanji (fellow author Ray Hecht feels the same way, and he studied Japanese before tackling Chinese).

Coming from French and German, Chinese was deceptively simple. No verb conjugations, no verb tenses per se (no passe simple, which we skipped in every French class I ever took), Subject-Verb-Object order , and oh what’s this, four tones? Sure, no problem.

It’s not as hard as people think it is, but maybe not as useful either.

The Chinese people themselves were friendly, open. The expat community…well, what can I say? I mean, it’s interesting to me how expats can adapt certain features of their adopted lands. The China expat literary community has a rigid hierarchy, where guanxi nets you more than talent, like drawing to like, and believe me, these people are acutely myopic concerning what constitutes their kind. If you don’t write the specific way their creative writing dogma says they should write, if you have your own voice rather than someone’s idea of what a “real writer” does, good luck. Remember: the last thing you want to do in writing, a creative pursuit, is, you know, be creative. The herd doesn’t appreciate that.

Let’s hope Japan’s expat community is nothing like China’s.

I read through the Gaijin Smash archives, and Azrael has something that’s missing from most current China blogs: a sense of humor. Go on Twitter and check out the China watchers. These people are so God damn self-serious, I can’t stand it, though it is something of a neat trick, the way they successfully insert themselves up their own asses…