I have been in Tokyo for almost a month now, and my English is already starting to suffer.

Not in the sense that I'm forgetting it, but it's starting to mutate into my own butchered version of the language. Just the other day I mistakenly refered to the English language like so: "It's written in American." 

Though I still speak English with my friends in the program or my family on the phone, lately, much of my life has been in Japanese. I was placed with a wonderful family in the ward of Nerima, and the best English spoken in the house is the father, who can read written English but oftentimes doesn't understand it. He peppers his sentences with the words he remembers: "Fantasitc!" "Beautiful!" "Molester!" (The last one is my fault. He might not have latched onto it had I not laughed so hard.)

When I learned that my host family didn't speak any English, I was excited as the prospect of improving my Japanese so much, but something else occurred to me. Was it possible to assert my personality in a foreign language?

Much of who I am back home relies on words.  Keeping sarcastic running commentaries on everything from classes to TV shows, using vocabulary that makes me cringe later at my own pretentiousness - what was I going to be if not a smartass?

 And not only that, but I was told, in great detail,  by everyone from the study abroad office to my exchange program, what I should expect from "Japanese culture." That it was a quiet, subdued place, where people always sacrificed their individuality for the sake of the group. That the father was always the boss of the family, the mother was little more than a servant for her husband, and children are never allowed to be children. I had prepared myself to separate my American identity from my Japanese one, and observe all the niceties and set phrases I had learned in class.

Instead, I found a family who might not fly in the face of these cultural traditions, but are nowhere near as cold and forbidding as the textbooks would have had me think. The father is your typical Japanese "salaryman," but I think there are few things he enjoys more than taking abuse from his wife and daughters. The mother does her fair share of chores, but works as a professional piano player, and her husband makes us dinner once a week when she has her late night gigs. The girls have their responsibilites, from piano to ballet, but they have no less fun than any kid I've ever met.

In the company of these people, I've found it's much easier to express myself than I thought. I've probably talked the most with the father: when we're not riffing off of each other, he loves to discuss cultural differences, and he's always interested to hear more about what things are like for me. I love playing with the girls, and the older one especially wants to learn more English. And just the other night, after asking me about my love life, the mother admitted that Japan's attitude towards women is not ideal, and that women are looked down on for working after they have children. "But," she said, with a fond grin for the man she spends most of her time teasing, "he said that he would support me in whatever I chose."

Of course, just because I express myself doesn't mean I haven't made adjustments for the culture I'm living in. I don't talk loudly in public, especially not in English. I walk on the very edge of the sidewalk so bikes don't have to swerve around me.  I spend the majority of my day on the train, sandwiched between four anxious salarymen. And when I go back to America, it's going to be very strange, living without "Ittekimasu," "Tadaima," "Ittedakimasu," "Gochisousamadeshita," and a nice hot bath at the end of the day.

But from now on, I think I'm going to be wary of anyone who tries to explain to me what "Japanese culture" is.