This is just a kind of conversation starter topic for long term residents. What is a decision that you made (or was made for you) when you first arrived which didn’t seem important at the time, but over the years its importance has become more apparent?
To give an example of what I mean, when I first moved to Japan in 1999 I didn’t speak any Japanese and thought I was just coming for a year to teach Eikaiwa.
So when I arrived someone at the school I worked at (who I would only fleetingly know as she quit shortly thereafter and I can’t even remember her name) helped me out with all the paperwork, opening a bank account, going to city hall, etc etc. She needed to write down a katana version of my name on the forms of course and I had no idea how to read katakana so I just let her write down whatever she thought was best because “Hey, who cares, I’m only here for a year and this won’t matter at all anyway.”
She chose a very clumsy approximation of my name that I would later learn is far inferior to other options that would have been both closer to how it is said in English and also a bit simpler. This wasn’t her fault, I didn’t make an effort to tell her the correct pronunciation and I think both of us were just trying to fill out the paperwork as fast as we could so we could get back to work, neither thinking it of any major importance.
That year in Japan turned into more than twenty (and counting) and I would later marry a Japanese national who would take my name and have two children who would also take my name.
But by “my name” I of course mean the katakana-ization of my name that person whose name I don’t remember hastily filled out on a form 24 years ago. While of course its possible to change these things, the fact is that once you’ve got one kana version of your name it becomes a hassle to try to go back and change it. I never bothered me too much so I didn’t think much of it until after my first child was born and then I realized that this katakana version of the name would be what they were to be known by in this society rather than the actual alphabetical version. And not just them, but possibly their children and their children after that. I am now the founder of the Japanese branch of my family which may last for generations, all of us known by a clumsy name decided on the fly by someone I barely knew filling out a form in a city hall waiting room in the late 90s.
This isn’t a complaint or big deal or anything, my katakana-ized version of my name isn’t horrendous. But its one of those things whose consequences I didn’t really anticipate way back when.