Pikachu

When filling out my housing application to live in one of the seminar houses at Kansai Gaidai, I asked if I could live with a Japanese roommate.  I figured that having a roommate from the country that I wanted to explore would give me a great source of cultural insight, so when I first arrived to Japan and found that my request was approved I was more than ecstatic!  Yuko Suziki greeted me with a smile and was eager to talk to me in English.  There is nothing negative I could ever think of when describing Yuko.  She’s polite, driven, kind, outgoing, and very organized.  She is always considerate of me and the rest of our suite roommates and goes out of her way to cook Japanese food for us.  It’s great that she’s enthusiastic about my interest in Japanese and get’s really excited when I learn new phrases from class and am able to add them to our daily conversations.  Yuko grew up in a Buddist temple, so as you can imagine she had a very traditional Japanese upbringing.   

But my roommate has broken all of my stereotypes about what exactly a typical Japanese person may be. Yuko is one of the funniest people I have encountered in Japan.  She is always laughing and making jokes and everything about her is silly.  She surprises me everyday with her awesome sense of humor, especially because cross-cultural jokes don't always go over well.  When I brought home a Pikachu mask and explained to her that it would be my Halloween costume, we both cracked up about it and continued to joke around about our share love for Pikachu.   

Easygoing is a perfect way to describe her, yet at the same time she manages to be extremely driven.  She commits countless hours to studying, to oncampus clubs, and to her part time job. Yuko is an exceptional human being and I consider myself very lucky to count her as one of my best friends here.  The fact that she’s Japanese helps me appreciate the culture in a more personal light and gives me the opportunity to learn through her emic view of her own country in which she grew up.