My name is Micaela.

- I'm Sharla.

I first came here as a very short term

exchange student type deal,

and I really loved it so I moved back here

and started teaching English for a few years

and then I moved back to Canada for a while

and then I transferred to a university here

and did that for another three years

and recently I've just been YouTube-ing and translating.

- So how long have you been in Japan?

- I think 11 years

- Yeah

- About.

I stopped counting.

But it's around 11.

- I came in 2005 so this is my 12th year in Japan

and I think it's safe to say

we've had quite a bit of experience.

Throughout those 10 plus years

we've experienced a lot of good things,

a lot of bad things,

but we always choose to stay,

and to keep pushing forward and persevering.

I know that a lot of you guys, before you come to Japan,

you are watching these videos

cause you're trying to get an idea

of what life is gonna be like

And I think that possibly

you're looking for a way to reassure yourself

that everything's gonna be okay.

And you probably have a lot of

you know, concerns and things you're worried about

and we're here to tell you that it's gonna be,

Everything's gonna be fine.

- We somehow managed to do it

- We have survived this long,

you can do it too.

There's nothing that makes us

more special than you guys

and if we can do it, you got this.

I wanna talk about the things

that were really hard for us

when we first came to Japan,

and how we're doing now.

And whether or not those difficulties

stood the test of time and are still difficult today,

or whether or not we overcame them.

And yeah, just have a little discussion about that.

(upbeat techno music)

- So when you first came to Japan, could you speak Japanese?

- The very first time, no.

I had been doing...

I think I had one year of Japanese studies

so I had like, hiragana and katakana, basic kanji down,

and I could say like "I wanna drink apple juice."

- When you came the first time you only studied for a year.

- Yeah

- So did you feel like a year was not enough?

- No.

Definitely not enough.

There's so much to learn in Japanese,

I feel like the first year of study,

if you're just in like, I studied in high school,

so I was just doing like a class in high school,

and we would focus on the alphabet

and very basic sentence structure.

So within the first year you don't really learn that much.

And while it does help you with like,

daily conversation with a friend,

it really doesn't help you do all the hard things

that are involved in living in another country.

So yeah, if you can prepare more before coming here,

I really do recommend it.

- Hmm. At the same time though,

I also have a similar experience

where I came as a high school student,

I was 17 years old when I came,

and I did Japanese high school.

I will say for all the stuff that I didn't know,

I picked it up really fast when I got here.

- I feel like it's a really easy language to pick up.

As confusing as it is, the pronunciation isn't hard,

so I feel like it's very easy

to hear what people are saying and copy it.

- Yeah and to look it up.

Even with kanji, I could not read kanji at all,

I think I knew like the kanji for 'watashi.'

- Right

- And maybe like 'getsuyobi.'

Yeah, exactly right, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

- That's what we learned.

- That is not helpful in real life.

I found that like, just through repeated exposure with kanji

just seeing labels on bottles or signs

- Forms

- You start to really pick up what those kanji mean,

even if you can't read them

or you don't know the stroke order particularly,

or like, the way to pronounce the words,

you start...

- Seeing it

- Yeah

- And knowing what it means

- Yeah, you pick it up really fast.

I feel like yeah, 10 years later,

I don't have a lot of trouble speaking Japanese.

I wouldn't say my Japanese is perfect.

- And it's definitely not you know like,

- Mhm, same

flaw-free,

and maybe I have a bit of an accent still,

but I don't feel like I have trouble communicating.

- Yeah, like we say weird things sometimes.

- I say weird stuff in English and in Japanese.

(Sharla laughs)

- You don't have to be perfect.

You gotta like,

you can't be shy about it.

- What's important is whether or not you have

the desire to understand.

- Yeah

- And like if you're trying to understand

what the person is saying

you're gonna figure it out.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I feel like we have to address kind of like

the elephant in the room kind of thing

that I think a lot of foreigners are curious about.

Do you ever feel like you are an outsider?

Did you feel like an outsider when you first came?

And did you ever have trouble

feeling like you were accepted?

- Hmmm, more so in the beginning.

I think I really noticed it more.

Like people looking at me,

and that could have been because I was in the countryside

and there weren't very many foreigners there.

- Yeah.

- But now that I'm mainly based in Tokyo,

like I'm outside of Tokyo for a living,

but I do come here often for work,

and there's so many foreigners here

you don't get the stares as much,

and you still do get it sometimes but

you get used to it.

Well, I got used to it.

I know there are some people that it bothers them

and they just can't handle it, they have to leave,

they never feel like they really fit in here.

You're always gonna be the outsider.

It's a mainly Japanese population.

You're never gonna just be seen

as a regular citizen here.

It just won't happen.

- It's very unrealistic to expect

that you can come here

and live the same life as everyone else,

even

just because

you've already experienced life somewhere else,

and that is already something that a lot of people here

do not have under their belt.

- Right.

- So you are special.

I'm not necessarily saying you're better than anyone else,

but your life is like, uniquely yours.

Try not to think of it as a defect.

- Right.

- Cause you're not defective.

There's nothing wrong with you.

I think that that's the thing that,

it's the type of thinking that

a lot of people get caught up in.

It's thinking that there's something wrong with them

because they're not the exact same as everyone else,

but I don't, I think you just need to really realize

that that's not true.

And there's nothing wrong with you.

You are different but that doesn't mean

that you're defective,

and it doesn't mean that like...

It shouldn't be a burden.

It should just be something that makes you unique.

And that sounds like such a Disney thing to say.

- It's true though, I know what you mean.

When you were in your original homestate,

what city where you in then?

Were you in Sakai to start with?

- No it was Miyazaki.

- Oh Miyazaki.

Oh okay, so you started off in a small town.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I started off in Miyazaki.

- So did I.

So I never had like, the getting handed an English menu,

getting talked to in English.

I think we both had a really like, good beginning

in that way.

- Mhm, yeah.

- Yeah, I think that really helped with our Japanese too,

cause we were just forced to use it.

- Yeah.

- And yeah I only really experienced all that

after coming to Tokyo,

after my Japanese got really good,

then I was being treated as a tourist.

But, I don't know, they just judge you

based on your appearance.

And you can't blame them for it,

because most of the foreigners in Tokyo are tourists.

- Yeah.

- And I'm sure that's what they're trained to do

in their job when they see a foreigner,

they give them an English menu.

- Yeah.

- You can't really take it negatively.

- Yeah.

You know, everybody's experience is different.

You are right to feel frustrated sometimes.

I'm not saying like, you're wrong

if you feel discouraged,

or you're wrong if you feel like,

a little disappointed from time to time.

But I think it's just like,

dealing with that is one of the things that I feel like

for the 10 years, over 10 years that I've been here,

it's something that's like a consistent theme.

- Something that you develop.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And you're just kind of like

"Okay, how am I going to respond to this this time?"

And each time, just try to take it a different way,

and respond a different way,

and see how you leave that conversation feeling.

- Mhm.

- Like if you feel like

"Okay, I think I handled that well,

"and everyone's happy."

Then maybe try to do more of that.

- Yeah.

- Instead of just getting upset.

Finally, you often talk about

planning to go back to Canada eventually.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So what makes you think that

you do not want to stay here forever?

- Having kids.

I don't wanna have a kid in Japan.

So really that's the only reason.

I think otherwise I wouldn't be planning

to go back to Canada,

at least at this point in my life.

But because I'm a foreigner,

and my partner is a foreigner,

I feel like having a completely foreign child in Japan

would make things difficult.

Because they would be born in Japan,

to them they would be Japanese,

this is all that they know,

they've lived here, they've grown up here,

but they would be treated as an outsider,