Author: Christine Carroll Major: Economics Country: Japan Program: International Business Seminar in Japan

The moments I spent with my short-term homestay family in Toyota City are some of my favorite memories from the five weeks I spent in Japan, but not for the reasons I would have expected. I chose this program in order to increase my global and political understanding of international economics, and was excited bear witness to a country and a culture so different from my own. I traveled to thirteen cities on the Walton College International Business Seminar in Japan, and having already been in the country for more than two weeks, I was no stranger to navigating the steep language barrier. Schoolchildren in Japan begin learning English at a young age, and with the help of translation technologies, there were very few times when we had significant difficulty communicating with others.  

My homestay experience flipped this learned comfort on its head. The few days I stayed with a retired couple in their home I was challenged to engage with them and learn about their lives with no common language between us—I understood almost no Japanese, and they weren’t quite comfortable operating Google Translate. At first I was terrified. It’s already a little awkward navigating a new homestay relationship, and I knew it would be made that much more difficult without a good line of communication. That fear wasn’t completely unfounded—the first night was exhausting. Slowly, though, once I got past the growing pains of a new experience, I saw how much room there was to learn and share between us without the help of language.  

What struck me so intensely was their willingness to open their home to me; a person they knew would be largely unable to communicate conventionally with them. They welcomed me so warmly—leading me around the home, pointing out the bathroom, my room, and the things they had prepared for my stay. They showed me family pictures—I gathered that we would meet their daughter and grandchildren for dinner the next night. I learned that the husband enjoys woodworking and had made all of the cabinets and cuckoo clocks (of which there were many) in their house—he would point at his creations and then to his hands to indicate when something was his handiwork. In the morning they fed me and drove me to my first activity. The husband let me feed the goldfish in their garden. 

This kindness was not limited to my homestay family. That day we visited the Toyota headquarters to tour their manufacturing plants and meet with a high-level corporate project manager. Unsurprisingly, we were met with the same openness and warmth that I had experienced with my homestay family. The people we interacted with were genuinely invested in our mission during that visit, wanting us to learn and see as much as possible. After experiencing this same attitude enough times at different companies, I realized that this was standard. 

Back with my homestay family, I continued to be the recipient of their generosity. At dinner their grandson showed me how to roll my own sushi, their daughter taught me how to make takoyaki, and their granddaughter walked me through the steps of her favorite origami creations. Still with minimal shared language between us, they opened their home, their lives, their favorite foods, and their hobbies to me. These memories are so precious to me—the purity of sharing the things that make us happy transcended any obstacles that might have existed between us.  

I will always remember the things I got to see and do in Japan—the temples we visited, the ceremonies I was witness to, the change in pace from the major cities to the coastal suburbs. I will look back on each company visit—from major corporations like Walmart and Toyota to the family businesses like Takata Orimono—with a better understanding of both the international and domestic implications and the historical context of the Japanese economic system. Every time I travel I will be grateful for the skills I learned traveling between thirteen cities in thirty-three days—packing and repacking, transferring between planes, trains, subways, taxis, and ferries. Yet among all that I learned and saw this summer, my favorite memory will always be that morning with my homestay family when I got to feed the goldfish in their pond. Standing there, the husband showing me where to throw the food in the stillness of the morning, we didn’t need words between us to share in this daily ritual.