Living in Japan. It's a simple phrase, a graspable concept, an image that the mind constructs with ease. You would love Japan. You would give it your all, your undivided attention, your emotional and mental loyalty. West and East shall meet in one embrace, interweaving fingers and blinking stares.

Yet, the imagination's success in conceiving of a life in Japan belies the subsurface intricacies. Like any relationship, life in Japan becomes complicated quickly. You've read Japan's manga, borrowed its movies, read its poetry, written its poetry, drank in its food, and tasted its beverages. Yes, Japan tastes pretty good, until it's screaming at you for stealing its movies, or smoking in its apartment, or spilling your Western wine on its tatami mat because you hit your glass with Japan's kendo sword.

The East is nothing like the West. The East does not understand the West. It was easy to be intrigued by Japan's style - its animation and lilting speech and old-style kimonos. But it was difficult to understand. Where did things go wrong?

It was probably all wrong from the beginning, but there were instances that hinted at larger problems: the conversations on the language, the philosophy, the art. You and Japan never met eye to eye on those things.

Japan's language, first of all, was incomprehensible. Strange verb tenses, cascading levels - terraces of formality, confusing and misleading absences of first person pronouns. In Japanese, nouns and adjectives are conjugated, but subjects are often left out of sentences. In a way, this represents an entirely different way of thinking - thought patterns, brain structures, and neural pathways different from those pioneered by the Indo-European languages. In fact, Japanese has its own language family, distinct from those of many other Asian countries. It comprises languages spoken on mainland Japan and those on many of its southern islands, like Okinawa.

To make matters more confusing, Japan uses three alphabets. Three alphabets! The distinctly Japanese alphabets are katakana and hiragana, syllabaries which are used to write out Japanese words in a piecemeal fashion similar to Western writing. The two alphabets represent the exact same sounds, except that the hiragana are used for native words and the katakana are used for foreign words.

Why use two aurally identical alphabets instead of one? It seems nonsensical, like it should impede understanding, but it doesn't always. In fact, the katakana let you know when Japan was using a word you should understand. Understanding three words out of a paragraph was better than no words.

The third alphabet used in Japanese is the stylistically beautiful and linguistically lamented kanji. The point when you ran into kanji and tried to understand, that was where the real communication breakdown occurred. The geographically isolated and individualistic yet social and hierarchical language was one thing, a stumbling block at least, but the kanji were just madness. Adapted from the Chinese system, but adjusted to fit the Japanese language, kanji are always a challenge for foreigners (unless maybe they're Chinese). The individual symbols have meaning, but can also be combined to form different and more complex meanings. Kanji can be fun, but is also frustrating, like a second language inside the framework of another.