Meeting the Neighbors

We brought a lot of little gifts with us when we came, knowing that there are many people you are required to give gifts to upon or shortly after arriving. One traditional transaction that takes place is gifting all of your neighbors as part of your official introduction, and sometimes they gift back too.

We've been busy and sort of putting off officially meeting the neighbors - it isn't the kind of thing that would thrill me in English, and in Japanese there was the possibility of it being pretty awkward. However, one of the neighbors broke the ice for us and came up to say hi and give us some bean cakes that will be discussed in another post shortly. I think I caught about three words of what she said.

After that, we figured we might as well go and meet the rest of them and hand out the gifts, as it was a national holiday and we thought people should be home. First we spent a while with the dictionaries and grammar books and made a cheat sheet to practice off of, and that worked pretty well for conveying our introduction to them, but some people then sort of figured we could speak Japanese pretty well after hearing us and went on at a mile a minute shortly thereafter. This is despite our assertion of 'Nihon-go dekimasen' which we said at least once for every person we met - means literally 'Japanese language I cannot' but theoretically is proper in Japanese. Anyhow, it was definitely a little awkward but they seem nice enough and we successfully followed the form of the thing as best I can tell, so yay us.