So the past few days have been pretty much some of the worst days I’ve had during my stay at JCMU. Everything had been all hunky dory until Thursday morning, where I woke up at exactly 8:45am thanks to someone calling my room. My alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and so I had exactly 5 minutes to get dressed and run to class. I very briefly pondered just skipping the first hour but I had a quiz and a reading check so I went anyway. Well, I probably should have skipped after all since I hadn’t been able to study at all that morning for either the quiz or reading check, and so I basically failed both. After having that wonderful experience, I was then told by a classmate that he had heard Kayoko and his girlfriend discussing the fact that Kayoko wanted to switch rooms. He told me that they planned to talk to the office about it before bothering to tell me, and he told they that they should talk to me first. So for the rest of the class period I sat there worrying about what exactly would be the problem. I figured it had to be some simple misunderstanding and that we would be able to work it out if we could just talk about it a bit. Well by the time class got over I went back to my room and waited. As the knot in the pit of my stomach got bigger, I sent Kayoko an email on her cell phone asking her to come back to the room, just incase she had planned on going somewhere else.

Around 12:15pm she shows up with Youko, uses the bathroom and then comes out. At this point her normal facial expression had completely changed, and she was staring at me with these incredibly cold eyes. She told me “mou, yadda” and “I can’t take it anymore, I’m tired”. She told me she wanted to move out. I was completely shocked and so I asked her why she wanted to move out. She continued to look at me with a very cold expression, and kept saying that she was too tired and that she had so much “stress piling up” from living with me and that it was causing her to miss sleep and not do well in class. I couldn’t see how this was possible so I asked her if she didn’t like me. She gave me some ambiguous answer, so I asked back in Japanese if she hated me. She replied back, in English, “Yes, I hate you”. I couldn’t believe it. I became very upset and started to cry, and Kayoko continued to rattle off her reasons for why she hated me and why she wanted to move out. She said I didn’t give her a gift when she moved in (which, I wasn’t aware she would buy anything for me, and I did give her something a week later when I went to Himeji), that I was selfish because I only “talked about my own things”, that I talked too fast in English several days prior which upset her (which she hadn’t told me), even that she just didn’t like Sirotan. The one that got me the most was the fact that I asked her not to wash dishes while I was still asleep, after a morning where she was cleaning the kitchen at 6am and woke me up. She told me that it was “her way of life” and that she didn’t want to change it. All the while I was asking her why she suddenly decided this and why she never told me that anything was bothering her since we would have been able to compromise on some things, but all the while she just looked at me and shook her head. While it was all going down Youko was sitting on the floor, occasionally nodding when I would say things to Kayoko, and was also crying. It really upset me when Kayoko asked Youko why she was crying, despite the fact that I’m sitting there very upset, and she completely ignored me. Eventually I could see that nothing I could say would change her mind or stop her from saying such hurtful things to me, so I went into my room and closed the door. During the remaining time that Kayoko and Youko were in the room, I could hear Kayoko talk about me, in Japanese, to Youko. At one point I yelled out through my door at her, but she ignored me and continued to talk about me, like I had no clue what they were saying.

After they both finally left to go to their afternoon class, I called my mom over Skype and told her everything that had just occurred. We talked for about an hour and I tried to calm down a bit although the fact that someone I thought had become my friend had so suddenly told me that they hated me and I still didn’t know why made it pretty difficult. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never had anyone ever tell me that they’ve hated me before. My mom told me that I should talk to Karen about it, so after getting off of Skype I walked through the buildings to look for her but I guess she had already left, so I went back to my room and tried to deal with the day’s events. Add that to the fact that tomorrow was test day, and because I didn’t do very well on the last test, I had planned on really getting down to my studying before my roommate had completely turned on me. Well the rest of the evening was spent by watching a bunch of Law & Order: SVU episodes to escape reality, and eventually studying for the test.

Friday morning I got up early to study for my test and tried to escape from my room without having to see or speak to my roommate. I was completely puzzled when she basically told me the equivalent to “have a safe trip!” in Japanese on my way to school. I said nothing at all back to her. Sitting in class during my test was absolute torture, since I basically felt like I was going to throw up due to the anxiety I had over my planned visit to Karen’s office after the test. (Luckily I think I did better on this test than the previous one, but we’ll see once I get my grade back…) Once the test was over I went in to Karen’s office, and since I had sent her an email about the whole situation the night before, she was expecting me. She had already visited the office and told me that Kayoko hadn’t talked to anyone about switching rooms and that it was as much of a shock to her as it was to me. I told her everything that Kayoko had told me, and despite wanting to do it calmly, it didn’t happen. It was nice to be able to talk to someone about this in person, since Cassidy was really the only girl friend I had from JCMU who I could tell such things to, and it just wasn’t the same since I could only talk to my Mom on Skype or type out the issue with other friends on AIM. She gave me a shoulder to cry on, and for a while we discussed what could have led to this, and she even showed me a few examples she had had to prepare for something for her Masters, about Japanese people who have acted very nice and happy until sometime in the future they become upset at you for something you did weeks ago and thought had been fine.

After talking, I had to go to the Friday Project, which was the tea ceremony again. I know I looked horrendous, with my face all red and puffy, throughout the whole thing so I did my best to just kind of hide in the corner and not get noticed. After that was over I escaped to Coco’s with some new students that I’ve been hanging around with, and after lunch volunteered at the last minute to help show a group of elementary school kids around JCMU. This consisted of everyone breaking off into groups of 1 or two, and then pairing up with about 5 or 6 12-year olds at a time, where we basically were asked the same questions in each group, like “What is your favorite color?”, “What kind of animals do you like?”, “How old are you?” etc. This went on for a while until they broke out the spinning tops and tried to get us all to play with them as well. We all got a little bit of practice, then they had all the gaijins come up and one by one, show if we had mastered making the top spin. Luckily I was able to do it quite well! Afterwards we gave them a tour of the building, and then came back to the conference room where they gave us a gift. By the time it was all over, it was about 3:30pm.

While this was all going on, Karen had come up to me to tell me that at 4pm there would be a mediation session between Kayoko and I, along with Karen and some people from the office. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it at all, but I figured that I would give it a shot anyway, incase there was anything that I could work out. Karen also told me that it would make me feel better afterward if I was able to tell her how everything she said to me had made me feel. As 4pm was rapidly approaching, I was getting increasingly nervous, and when I went over to the academic building and knocked on the door to the small conference room, I was told that they needed a little bit more time with Kayoko (who had been in there since 3:45pm). So, I waited outside the doorway. And waited. And waited some more. Since my watch is still dead and there were no clocks anywhere I didn’t know how long I had waited until Isaki-san from the office emerged from the room and asked me how long I had been waiting there. I told him since 4, and he was surprised and said to me that I could go back to my room to wait because they still weren’t ready for me. So, I went back to my room. I couldn’t really imagine what they could have been talking about in there for almost 2.5 hours. Around 6pm the phone in my room finally rang, and I nervously hurried down to the small conference room once again. This time they let me in and I sat at the end of the table, with Karen to my right and Kayoko to my left, and Isaki-san and someone else from the office at the other end of the table. I asked what had taken place while I wasn’t there and Karen gave me the rundown. Then she told me how the rest was going to go: Kayoko would tell me her grievances, and then I would summarize and repeat them back, and then she would do the same thing. So Kayoko starts out by flipping open her notebook and reading off a list of things that she has against me. Basically, I hadn’t heard any of these until this very moment. Things like, my face didn’t “show enough happiness” when she prepared some bizarre food that I tried to eat (and did, and liked it), she didn’t like it that I didn’t need her help on my homework, she was offended when I didn’t go play ping pong with her at some time, staying in my room with my door shut made her feel ‘lonely’, and on and on and on. The one legitimate thing was that she sent me an email when she didn’t come back from Tokyo on the day she planned and I never sent her one back. Ok, so sometimes I’m bad when it comes to replying to emails in a timely manner. However, everything else that she listed off was just completely petty stuff to which I had no idea she had an issue with. That and being someone’s roommate doesn’t mean I’m there to hold her hand all the time and make sure she’s always entertained and isn’t feeling lonely. Peacefully coexisting with a roommate should be the ultimate goal, anything more is a plus but not necessary. So after she finished rattling off her list, I had to summarize it and repeat it back. Note that during this Kayoko is speaking in Japanese, and had to continue to be corrected when she would refer to me as ’she’ instead of by my name, and never bothered to look at me while speaking. Karen was translating for her and then when I responded in English, Isaki-san would translate for Kayoko.

When it came to my turn to tell her my side of the story, I basically said how I thought everything was going great until Thursday, and then I basically listed everything that she had said to me during her ‘emotional assassination attempt’ (so says my mom), talking about how she told me she hated me and how I asked that back to her, twice in Japanese, to make sure I was hearing her correct. All the while that I’m saying all these things, Kayoko is sitting there, doing the heavy sighs, and making these ugly faces every time I would repeat something she had said to me the day before. Karen had to ask her at one point to stop it, she was acting so immature. After I was done, she had to repeat everything back, and while she tried doing that she kept going off track and saying a lot of other unnecessary things, causing Karen and the office people to tell her to stay on the topic at hand. After she had finished she hadn’t bothered to address the main issues, how she had told me she hated me and how she had been spreading rumors about me and generally just talking bad about me to other people (usually while I was within earshot). Karen then told her to repeat both of those things back, which she finally did after much sighing. Then it was time where we could talk to each other, and since Kayoko didn’t seem eager to start, I asked her things like why she told me she hated me, why she didn’t bother to bring up any of these issues she had with me earlier so that we could have attempted to work things out, among other things. She first attempted to change her story to say that I had told her that I hated her first, which I most certainly did NOT, and then later tried to say that the word ‘hate’ really doesn’t mean the same thing in English and Japanese…to which I countered with the fact that the Japanese word for hate is something you learn very early on in 1st year Japanese, and since she had been taking English for a much longer period than I had taken Japanese, she knew exactly what she had said (not to mention the two times I repeated it back to her in Japanese). When talking about why she hadn’t bothered to bring up any of the issues with me beforehand, she turned to me and told me (in English, with a very cold expression on her face) that she was “too tired”. I told her that it was her responsibility alone to bring up issues she had with me, since I had no way of knowing and I certainly cannot read her mind. Since the only issues she had with me were very pretty, and completely irrelevant things, during the last stage of the mediation she basically had nothing to say, and so spent most of the time not bothering to look at me and not saying much. At one point, where she told me in English that she was too tired, she tried to do some kind of stare down, and while I may have been incredibly upset at that point, I didn’t back down and so I ended up winning that little match. The entire time during the mediation session, she sat there with a cold, uncaring look on her face, showing no emotion whatsoever. At one point, the people from the office asked her a few questions as to what her definition of a roommate was, and also if she thought there was a problem in a room, if it was always the roommate’s problem. She couldn’t even answer this one. This prompted both the people from the office to kind of sit in their chairs to the side and look at Kayoko with a sideways glance that basically communicated “what are you thinking??”. As the mediation session came to a close (it was around 7:30pm at this point), Karen asked me what I wanted to do, and I told her that there was no way I could be roommates with Kayoko any longer, since it was very uncomfortable for me to be in my room just knowing that she was also in there. I told Kayoko there was no way I could ever trust her again, based on what she had said to me, for which she was confused since she thought that even if we couldn’t be roommates we could still be friends. I told her that was not possible since I will never be able to forget what she said to me. The session ended with Karen telling Kayoko that she was to move out of my room by midnight that night. She told her “I want you to know that, I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this only for Nikki.” And with that I left, after thanking Karen and the people from the office.

I returned to my room as fast as I could and basically shut myself in my room, grabbed my laptop and my headphones, and watched some Law & Order: SVU with the volume up high so that I wouldn’t have to hear what Kayoko was doing in the next room. Luckily she began to pack up her stuff right as she got back to the room. I chatting with some friends online about the outcome of the mediation session and basically just sat in bed….waiting. Eventually some other students came in to help Kayoko move her CRAP LOAD of luggage (she had at least 20 boxes), and Megan (Adams) knocked on my door to see how I was doing, which was very nice of her. I was embarrassed by my messy room but she tried to cheer me up a bit anyway. Soon after that I heard the door close and it became quiet once again in my room. I called my mom and told her what had gone down, and then checked to see if Kayoko had stolen anything on her way out. I think I’m missing 1 chopstick rest but that’s not really something I used in the first place…. The new roommate (Mariko, another Japanese student who has been here since last semester), had already moved her stuff in, but I hadn’t seen her yet and she was no longer in the room. While sitting around I got an IM from Scott, inviting me for some rounds of Texas Hold’em, to which I gladly accepted. Tried to compose myself a bit (I knew I looked horrible and there wasn’t anything I could do about it), grabbed some snacks and some pop, and headed over to his room, where we were joined by 3 other students (Tim, whom I’m going to Hokkaido with soon, Nathan, whose in 4th year, and Michael, whose in 2nd year with Scott). I told them all the condensed version of what was going on, and Michael kindly shared some of his Lawson’s bought vodka which I mixed into my pop, since I figured if there was a good night to get wasted, that would be tonight. So we played poker, ate peanuts, and drank for a couple hours, and I still was the first one who lost all their chips……ah well. I ended up having a lot of fun, which was nice, and I learned some other interesting things about Kayoko, like apparently she had come to JCMU because of someone here who had worked at the Expo whom she may or may not have been stalking. I also heard that she may be in (or close to) a sexual relationship with another student here…despite the fact that that student has a girlfriend back in the states. Tim and Nathan told me they would describe her as being sort of “strange”, so I guess maybe her attack against me wasn’t really personal….its just that she is a psychopath. She certainly has that no remorse thing going on, anyway.

So as it is now, life with roommate #4 has been going great. I’ve seen her a total of *2* times since she moved in, and she hasn’t even been sleeping here. She’s fairly nice as far as I can tell, but then I also thought Kayoko was very nice. I feel a little conflicted now, almost like after 5 months I’m finally experiencing culture shock, and I don’t want to make blanket statements like “all Japanese women are incredibly passive aggressive”, however my experiences now force me to think about that every time I interact with a Japanese student here. If everyone is like Kayoko, even asking that person if they have a beef with me will yield nothing, so then how do I deal with that? There’s no way I can coexist with another stranger without sometimes doing something that they don’t like, but if I don’t know what they don’t like, what do I do?? I’m going to have to do a lot of thinking on these questions within the near future. One positive that came out of all of this though, would be that I got a lot of support from people at JCMU (students and staff alike) who I wasn’t very close to in the first place. For a while I was starting to feel very isolated and alone, but once I started talking to some people about what had happened and trying to get some guidance/assistance, people really seemed to care about me and I really appreciate it a lot. I know that I do still have friends here and that they didn’t all leave last semester. I am still counting down the days until I get back to the US though. Until that happens, I’m going to try and just make it through the end of this semester without making it to roommate #5….