Observations: Familia Alignment

It has been a little over two months now, since our exchange student has entered our home. She has met our family and extended family (to include my parents, my in-laws and our siblings and significant others).

I think she feels pretty comfortable in our home; she helps herself to anything in the fridge and has keys our home in case no one is around when she comes home from school, which is rare.

My wife has noticed that she tends to gravitate towards me when it comes to arranging meetings with friends, help with homework or just talk about how her day went. My wife says she only gets one or two word replies where I get a more verbose response.

My personal feeling is that because I am part Japanese and have a limited knowledge of the language and a better understanding of their culture – I am a person she trusts and can relate to better.

Several things come to mind when that I understand as the norm, but my wife and oldest daughter doesn’t completely grasp.

a) Asking permission to do just about anything (such as use the phone, PC or enter our office area every time).
b) When eating a bowl of hot Ramen, the noodle is slurped in (to cool it before it is ingested).
c) Seldom if any talking during dinner at the table (our family chats away, she remains quiet and reserved).
d) Our student removes her shoes and puts on house slippers when entering our home (as I have done in the past and encouraged my children to do the same – who give me grief about it).

I am still trying to figure out what the complication is: My wife is busy doing her college work as she pursues her B.S. and spends a lot of time shut in a quiet room. Aya also comes home with homework and retreats to a room/desk set aside for her in order to study and complete homework.

Aya seldom makes eye contact with most members of the family in general. She is getting a little more involved with online (e-mails and visiting her MySpace account) than she has in the past – most of which are with her classmates and friends in Japan, some of whom are currently in the States also doing a one year stay.

My older daughter reports that she (Aya) doesn’t sit with the group of seniors on the bus to school and up front near the door so she can be the first one off and doesn’t really seem to want to hang-out with my daughter and her friends. She hasn’t stated why or why not, just seems to always have something better to do. I can only guess it is due the age difference or the fact that they are both girls who board together so sharing the same space can cause some unsettled differences (so I’ve heard amongst females).

Psychology was not a strong point of mine and here I am trying to figure out what goes on in young women’s minds. (I am thinking, yeah right!)

[Though this sounds like a critique, it is merely my observation.]

In her letter she wrote about why she wanted to visit America and become an exchange student was to learn and live American culture and share her culture with Americans.
- Actually what she shared with us some information about Okinawa and gave a gift during the first weeks, but haven’t spoken much about Japan since.
- She has not really asking the family a lot of questions about our culture, more or less living in it or existing in it.

What we expected:
- Talk about her ever day life in Japan and how they did things compared to how we do things.
- Sharing her experiences or cooking different meals
- Teaching us the Japanese and in turn having each of us teaching her our dialect and elocution.
- Our daughters becoming buddies and going a lot of places together, playing games together and giggling like school girls.
- A more open attitude, especially when we asked her to be more open and relaxed in the beginning.


I am not sure if we are the ones that are learning a new culture or are we preventing an exchange from happening.

Time will tell. We have scheduled some time with the local representatives to act as mediator, as we still have 7 more months to go and soon a cold winter to keep us in doors more often.