Addressing my first Japanese letter

Yesterday, I addressed my first envelope in Japanese. These envelopes contain invitation letters to Aikido practitioners from dojos affiliated with the one at TUFS. They are for the upcoming TUFS Aikido club camp. For privacy reasons, I photographed only the back of the envelopes.

 

It was indeed an important life lesson in living in Japan. Making mistakes is a learning process, and in the process of addressing my first Japanese letter, I indeed made quite a few errors. These included writing the name off centre, writing names too small or too big, irregular spacing between letters, and of course, incorrectly writing names (or addresses). In Australia, if I made an error whilst writing the address, I would probably either cross it out or white it out and correct the error. However in Japan, by any standards, that is not acceptable. If you sent a letter with corrections in the address or the name of the recipient, that is considerably rude and disrespectful. The point of writing a letter is to convey to the recipient that they are valued, and it defeats the purpose if the addressing is sloppy. Of course, in Australia, such meanings also exist, but definitely not to such an extent. This experience gave me further insight into the high standards expected of all citizens in Japan. It appears every citizen carries out their duty in upholding that expectation, and in my case, teaches ignorant foreigners how to do so as well.