In a conversation with an older friend recently, I realised that no matter how long you live in Japan, an international resident can never be fully enculturated.

You can speak fluently. You can have Japanese family. You can easily manage your daily life. You can even navigate natural disasters with grace.

But if you grew to adulthood outside Japan your reference point for most of life’s major milestones is non-Japanese.

We encounter milestones first as an observer of someone else’s life, then as a participant in our own. Your observations (mostly) happened in your home country. As a long-term international resident, the participation is happening in Japan.

For example, you probably attended weddings growing up. If you’re American, it’s the familiar scene of every romcom: the white dress, a religious service, bachelor parties, wedding guest fashion, dancing at the reception. When you attended your first wedding in Japan, it wasn’t the same at all. For the reception, you dressed in a black suit and prepared an envelope with gift money according to your rank and relationship.

Same for buying a house. If you did it in the US, there were multiple mandated inspections and disclosures before the closing settlement where the down payment you placed in escrow was transferred and the title handed over. But in Japan, there is no escrow. You pay the deposit directly to the seller when you sign the purchase agreement. And there are rarely inspections, much less mandated ones. If you back out of the purchase in Japan, you forfeit your down payment.

If you have kids, you’ve had education systems to learn. The daily report log, making obento, holiday homework, indoor shoes, compulsory team sports…it’s not like when you went to school.

Another example, and the one relevant to this week’s conversation, is elder care. If you helped your parents or grandparents through their end-of-life in the US, you learned the tangled web of Medicare and Medicaid (my sister and I wrote a song about it!), discovered supplementary insurance was needed, what levels of nursing care were available, and how private vs public services intersected. Then, when you become old enough to need elder care services yourself in Japan, you will find that the system involves universal long-term care insurance that covers all sorts of things from home helpers to assistive devices to help you stay independent at home. Utterly different.

So it’s always something new coming your way at every stage of life when you live in Japan. You won’t see it coming because your observations from childhood and of others’ lives in your home country set your expectations.

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Enculturation is a current event. Since the middle of last year, there’s been a spike in “foreigners are troublesome and don’t respect our society” sentiment. Overtourism combined with increasing numbers of foreign workers covering employment gaps has got citizens on edge.

Right now, the Japanese government is mulling over ways to help/force foreign residents fit better into Japan’s way of life. One of their ideas is to run mandatory classes about daily life and rules in Japan.

I think this would be about as useful as a junior high health class. A newcomer will dutifully sit though it to pass a test and get a visa. But just like explaining menopause to 14 year olds, it’s going to be information given at the wrong time, when it isn’t needed and won’t be remembered.

Is there a solution to fuller, more meaningful enculturation in Japan? Maybe, but it’s probably not the government that will solve this. I think comes down to

• Desire: You have to want enculturation. Many people like to feel accepted and will seek ways to fit in. But not everyone who lives in Japan desires to be in the society. They came for work, education, or to maintain family harmony with their Japanese spouse. Japan itself is irrelevant to them. The government isn’t going to make them fit in.
• Communication: Clearly, learning the language is key to living comfortably. But cultural communication goes far beyond vocab and grammar into unspoken rules and norms, even body language. It’s harder to learn these things as an adult, but deep observation and reflection helps. Government language classes will not solve cultural clashes.
• Connection: Bonds between individual people are absolutely essential for exchanging culture in a meaningful way. Joining clubs and group activities where people play together speeds the process. Government could get involved via a “buddy system” or “host family” scheme to pair international residents with locals, though that’s likely to lead to sempai/kohai hierarchy and that’s…well, I guess that’s enculturation, too.

Japan is not a monoculture; people’s way of life varies in every valley and village. International residents can learn a basic version from books and classes, but it’s setting aside expectations and committing to participation, including all the mistakes and successes along the way, that makes you really belong in the part of Japan where you live.