Q
What were the things you struggled with since you came to Japan?
A
I struggled a lot since there was a lot of difference in culture between Japan and Croatia.
For example, there is no name for roads and streets, and you need to eat the food using chopsticks,
but you are allowed to make slurping noise when you eat noodles,
and Japanese cuisine differs greatly from western cuisine,
and it is a taboo to get into the house with your shoes on and so on.
I frequently got confused by the number of differences of cultures.
Since Japanese is horizontal writing, they start writing from the end to the beggining of the notebook.
It is strange that Japanese all go out with the same kind of clothes or business suits.
Because Japanese are moslty shy, it was hard for me to make friends outside school.
Maya
It is also about language but one of the reasons is that Japanese are shy so it’s hard to make friends outside of the school and it’s hard to communicate because Japanese don’t know English well…
Q
How did you spend your school life?
A
All students who are attending this IB school are under various circumstance, environment, and situation.
Maybe because we are all from different country, and have diverse cultural background and religious belief, there were no discrimination or bullying. We are Croatian in Japan, so we won't be treated as Japanese at all.
Maybe it's because there is a lot of Japanese who doesn't know English, I often have trouble communicating with them.
Maya
If there are many people who are in the same situation (with international kids), their understanding will deepen so maybe they will feel the same kids in a good way.
I think one of the reasons are foreign kids are rare because there aren't many of them so I think there are things happen like that. I used to go to an international school when I was in kindergarten, and my friends weren’t like “Wow! She is a foreigner!” or like that but the children living around my house often stared at me and pointed at me.
