The journey of deciding to send my children to a Japanese school has been painfully arduous. My new friend I met here, Michelle can attest to this. Even before I came to Japan, I had been talking to American mothers who send their children to the local school. In all of Okinawa, there is ONE decent Japanese private school- the Catholic school. It is not very far from my home, but traffic is what makes the commute pretty daunting. The thought of my children living in Japan, but not knowing the language or immersing themselves in the culture didn't settle well with me inside. I don't exactly know what it was, but I wanted so much more for them, I wanted them to get a Japanese-cultured education, similar to the Korean education (I used to attend K and 1st grade in Korea). There are striking differences in the Korean/Japanese schools versus the American schools which I will go into later.
Michelle and I had been talking over the internet for 4 months before we met here, and have become friends since then! :) She is an American, living in Okinawa, married to an Okinawan, and has her two children at Catholic, unlike her, her kids have lived here almost their entire lives, and her husband is fluent in the language. From day one, she has been not so much discouraging me, but giving me a reality check about what it means to really send my children to a Japanese school and had been highly discouraging it. Not only Michelle, but any mother who had attempted to send their children to the Japanese school told me it wasn't the right choice, kids will struggle not only academically, but socially, and so on. Well, finally when I arrived in Okinawa, I had already made up my mind to send the children to the base school. Even though I had been in contact with the Catholic school before I came out, I didn't try to contact them since I arrived. The transition was so hard: language, food, people, weather, etc...
I do not want to sound boastful, but seriously, my life in Charleston was so comfortable: huge home, great neighbors, and we belonged to a great church. I was involved in the music community there, my children were settling very well in their neighborhood schools, and life was easy and good-until what I felt, somebody just plucked me out of comfortable Charleston to what to me seems like third-world Japan. (This is not entirely true, but there are definite parallels to my life and surrounding here compared to my life in 70's Korea.)
I felt lonely, sad, confused, and stuck. My children seemed to have accepted it better than I did, and my husband was thrown into work to be too busy to be lonely or depressed. The house here (at least the standards I had in Charleston) was atrocious. Small and dark, with fluorescent lights, bunker-style home with drop ceilings and concrete floors, was littered with cockroaches and ants. First week, I was cleaning cockroaches and its droppings. They were appearing everywhere-one night, every corner I turned, in a matter of 2 minutes, 5 came out: bathroom, bedroom, closet, kitchen and laundry room. Everybody was sleeping, I was up doing work at night (as it is US morning) and I was killing them. Panicking and desperate, I tried to wake up my five year old, who was the only one catching the cockroaches in the family, was sound asleep. My husband, deeply sleeping, wouldn't kill it after attempting to wake him up, and I had a panic attack. I couldn't sleep all night, the very next day, I marched with all my children to the housing office and cried to have the roaches bombed and killed. Well, that afternoon, entomology came out, and to this day I haven't seen one cockroach, However, I got sick. Whatever chemical they used must have been toxic-because it did a number on me, and I had a terrible migrane, lymph nodes were swollen on my neck as the size of a half of a golf ball, my limbs were swollen and I couldn't walk. I waited too long and rushed my self to the ER, and after a battery of tests, and 6 hours later, they had no diagnosis. Shortly days later, my symptons were gone and I was fine. I thought I was struck with some rare disease after coming to this island, or some crazy dirty cockroach bit me while I was asleep, nevertheless, I felt fine and a bit stupid for being so foolish to think I was going to die.
