Report: Mr. Matteo Pluchinotta

One year exchange program at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Kobe

The first few days in Japan brought to me a complete loss of independence: even though everything was similar to what I was used to, communication failed with most of the people and I couldn’t read or write anything. This is not as bad as it seems, it just means that I ended up in funny situations more often than usual and that I rarely get what I thought I ordered in bars and restaurants. After a couple of days, you develop your own little system to overcome these little everyday life difficulties. All of this makes Japan a special, exciting, and truly exotic place. I was really scared of coming here before leaving but after one week spent in this country I could already tell that I was going to like it a lot more than I imagined I would, and that turned out to be true.

The most difficult part is the language, and so far I haven’t done a very good job at learning it. I usually rely a lot on reading small words everywhere (advertisements, back of the cereal box, etc.) to learn a language but here, my understanding of those is sadly limited to “kanji-kanji-shimasu”... To overcome this problem, I have decided to take 4 more hours of lessons per week, in addition to the 1h30 offered by the research institute, starting in January. The other reason might just be the fact that I almost never get back from work before 8pm, thus making it hard to study or having time to do anything else than cooking, replying to emails and going to bed. This language-learning problem unfortunately makes it hard to become good friend with Japanese people as the subjects of conversation become very limited because of it.

Nishikawa-sensei and the lab staff gave me a very warm welcome in the Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. It was very easy to fit in this place because of its good atmosphere. It is run in quite a western way: no hierarchy-based behaviors, everybody speaks English and a quarter of the staff comes from abroad. It is therefore not a typical Japanese lab but I think that it is this mix of cultures that makes it a special place. It is at the image of Kobe, a city said to be the easiest to live in for foreigners. After visiting Kyoto and Tokyo, I can maybe see why it is so. People speak less English here, but the perception of the gaijin is different: you are not considered as a tourist or some kind of colonialist but just as a weird person that works and lives here, and speaks bad Japanese. It seems that this comes from Kobe’s history as the first port of entry for foreigners in Japan.

Reading the book “The Innocent Anthropologist” by Nigel Bradley helped a lot in understanding the way I, and I think most of mankind, act when we are immerged in a culture that is different than ours. We somehow turn ourselves into amateur anthropologists, trying to understand how and why things work the way they do in this society that is new to us, by constantly asking stupid questions about everything.

In the end, I must say that Japan, and more specifically Kobe, surprised me a lot, in the sense that it was actually a lot like I imagined it would be: the country of the paradoxes; It’s extremely similar to Switzerland yet completely different at the same time, old traditions are still omnipresent but so are modernity and technology, people are not prone to open themselves but it seems easier here than anywhere else to meet complete strangers in the street and have a good time with them.

Matteo Pluchinotta

Kobe, December 6th 2010