Recently a friend was hospitalized and I thought it would be nice to go and visit them. I have spent months at a time in the hospital in the US and found it to be lonely and depressing. Not a single friend of mine came to visit me. I also was the only person to visit my father after he had brain surgery besides his wife, who I had to drag to see him. Before my mother died she was in the hospital for 3 months and I would go and bathe her every couple of days. My brother only visited her once and her husband did not visit her at all, but her boyfriend came to see her everyday. I suspect her boyfriend is why her husband did not visit her. When my grandfather fell ill I actually paid a cousin to visit him when I couldn’t make it to see him, as he lived a six hour drive away from me. Needless to say, I have a lot of experience with hospitals in the US. For me, hospitals are sad lonely places where visitors can comes and brighten a person’s day and make sure they have everything they need. When my best friend was in the hospital, I went to see him almost every day and brought him books and magazines and talked about fashion or just watched tv together so he wouldn’t be alone.

With all my hospital visiting experience, I knew enough to call the hospital and ask what I can and cannot bring when I visit. What I didn’t know is that visiting a friend in the hospital who is going to be there for a under a month, even once, is considered rude and selfish. This is so weird to me. Visiting someone in the hospital in Japan is reserved for family. There are also almost no private rooms, so when you visit you must go into a visiting space which requires the person you are visiting to be able to leave their bed and then makes the visiting room occupied and unavailable to others. This is so weird to me. All of it is really weird to me. I apologized to my friend for thinking I should visit them in the hospital.  Something I would have never wanted or had to do in the US. It is always surprising to me when a culture clash thing happens. It just reminds me tht while this is my chosen home, it is still a “host country”. There is so much I just don’t know about Japan and so much I will never learn. Sometimes I think about leaving and starting over, and then the feeling of starting over is just too overwhelming. Oh well, life goes on.