Moving to Japan with practically no friends is harsh. The built-up stress from 3 months of self-quarantine made it even worse. So by the end of May, when Japanese government lifted the state of emergency, I decided to try going to meetup events. From all the events being held, the one that got me interested was this eikaiwa (英会話, English conversation) event held in a cafe owned by another foreigner. It’s basically a place for foreigners to meet up & communicate in English, and for Japanese (and non-native English speaker like me) can practice their English-speaking skill.
I’m not really good at meeting & talking with new people, so at first, going there was a challenge. Three months of practically not meeting anybody made me anxious. What if I can’t communicate normally? What if I can’t make friends? These kind of thoughts still lingers even now, but I decided to just 'man up' and go there every weekend, meet some new people.
Now there’s something I realize by going there frequently: the cafe has some unique patrons. I think there are 4 people I meet almost every time I go there, and these people seems kind of 'different' than the rest. The first one is an old man, maybe around 60 years old, that seemed to have some kind of trouble with communicating. His English isn’t bad, and it seems like he’s seriously learning, but sometimes he interrupts others and then speaks 'nonsense' or something trivial (smart watches, self-driving cars, dentistry done by machines, any other random things, really) that doesn’t have anything to do with the topic being talked. I don’t know, maybe he just didn’t get what’s being talked about and wanted to change the subject, but doing it so abruptly seems weird to me, because I think what he does is unlike what any other Japanese person (at least that I know of) would do.
The second is also a Japanese old man, but this one apparently had lived in US for 20 years and got US citizenship before coming back to Japan. He even legally changed his name to sounds more "western" or something. He’s a smart guy that know many things, but somehow he still sound like a typical boomer who will criticize anything about the younger generations. He often talks about how Japanese nowadays are unlike Japanese 30 years ago when he was young. I found it weird, because he lived overseas for so long, but when he came back, he still sounds like every other condescending Japanese old men.
The third one is a Japanese guy in his late 30’s or early 40’s. Unlike 2 old men I mentioned earlier, this guy’s English isn’t that good. He basically stutters everytime he tries saying something in English. In conversations, sometimes his replies doesn’t really make sense. Another thing that I found weird is how loud his voice is when he speaks in English, but the volume suddenly gets lower when he speaks in Japanese. Perhaps this guy is an example of how someone’s personality may change when they speak different language.
The fourth person I basically meets every time I go there is a half Japanese, born-and-raised American guy. I think there’s nothing specifically weird or unique about this guy, but maybe because he’s the foreigner I met the most (beside the cafe’s owner), to me he represents every other foreigners I’ve ever met there. He is, or they are, or maybe we are pretty talkative, eager to converse in English. Even to Japanese guys whose English don’t really make much senses. Perhaps because speaking in Japanese is somehow stressful for us. Perhaps it reminds us how foreign we are, and how we’ll never be fully accepted here, no matter how well we speak the language.