By Pippa Byron

Last week, Gabrielle Headly, an employee at the Japanese Embassy’s Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC), came to visit us and talk about her experience with studying Japanese culture, studying abroad in Japan, as well as her life’s career path and how Japan has influenced it. Gabrielle’s story ended up being really interesting to me because not only did she go to Japan, she intertwined it in her life and learned many skills and lessons during her time there.

Gabrielle started by explaining how she was first introduced to Japan through its pop culture. She said that as someone of Caribbean descent, she could feel that Japanese culture was very different to her own, which intrigued her. This led her to self-study Japanese for a while. Later, as a high school graduation present, Gabrielle went to Okinawa, Japan, where her uncle worked on an American military base. This trip was a great experience for her, and she decided to continue pursuing her love for Japanese through minoring in Japanese in college. 

In her Junior year of college, Gabrielle spent a semester studying abroad in Osaka, Japan. She said Osaka was a very fun city to live in and the university she went to, Kansai Gaidai University, was a great place for cultural exchange, being an international school. After spending this extended period of time in Japan, she realized she wanted to live there. She greatly appreciated the sense of safety she felt in Japan and the vibrancy of the culture.

To pursue her dream of living in Japan, after graduation, Gabrielle decided to apply to the JET program — a program that connects Americans to English teaching jobs in Japan and arranges their stay there. Gabrielle was accepted, and was sent to a small town in Oita prefecture. Upon her arrival there, she was surprised to find out that the town was largely art-focused, and that most of the people and establishments there were related to different art forms. Gabrielle had previously mentioned to us that pottery was one of her biggest interests even back in the U.S., and she had done a lot of work and classes related to pottery. So, along with her teaching work, she was “adopted” into a ceramics store, where she did pottery and was introduced to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which is a technique that uses gold to fix broken pottery. Along with becoming invested in her community, she also got to travel a lot and see different areas of Japan.

Later on, she decided to end her teaching contract with JET and continue to live in Japan on her own. She moved to Fukuoka, a larger city, where she studied pottery and got officially certified in Kintsugi. Here, she met a lot of interesting people with unique interests such as punk music, and made lots of great friends. Gabrielle told us that she had had a bit of trouble in Japan regarding her hair, as people in Japan often didn’t know about black hair and assumed she had gotten a perm or that her hair was messy. However in Fukuoka, she happened to meet and become friends with a hairdresser who was interested in learning how to work with black hair, which became mutually beneficial for both of them. Meeting so many people she connected with on a deep level was one of the best experiences Gabrielle had in Japan, and she is still friends with them to this day.

In 2023, Gabrielle decided to move back to the U.S. She found out about a job opening at the Japan Information and Culture Center involving their exhibitions. She realized this would be a great position for her, as she loved the idea of being able to teach others about Japanese culture. She eventually became the exhibition coordinator at JICC, and she’s able to put both her creativity and her knowledge of Japan into her work. She even has an upcoming exhibition about Yōkai, which are supernatural entities in Japanese folklore, and we’ll have the opportunity to see it soon!

To me, Gabrielle’s story was extremely inspiring for a few different reasons. To begin with, I thought it was amazing how Gabrielle took Japanese, which was just a hobby at the beginning, and turned it into a lifelong journey of experiences and career opportunities. I am still having trouble figuring out exactly what I want to do in the future, and seeing that it’s possible to find a job that connects so strongly to your interests was really enlightening to me.

Also, I really enjoyed hearing about her experience connecting with different communities throughout Japan and finding lifelong friendships. As someone who also wants to go abroad in the future, I’ve heard a lot about people living in a different country than theirs who struggle to integrate socially because of vast cultural differences. But Gabrielle’s story proves that finding shared interests with others, as well as engaging in community activities and traditions, can foster a sense of belonging and build new friendships no matter how different a place’s culture is. Moreover, I thought that it was great that even though Gabrielle was away from the U.S., she was able to continue pottery, a hobby that she loved, and study Japanese styles of pottery, an experience that she wouldn’t have gotten in the U.S.

Lastly, I liked that Gabrielle had tried a lot of different things before settling down in her current occupation, like teaching and moving to different places. I think that it’s often good for people to experience and try a lot of different things in life before settling down, instead of just going down a straight line to one job or living situation, and I also hope to try a lot of things just like Gabrielle. Gabrielle’s current position also highlights one of the benefits of living in D.C. As the capital of the U.S. where all the embassies are, there are a lot of opportunities related to world cultures and diplomacy. As someone who’s really interested in both, it made me realize that I should take as much advantage of living here as I can. 

Altogether, it was an inspiring story of following one’s passion, and I think all of us learned a lot from it, and I’m excited to visit Gabrielle at the Embassy of Japan and learn more about her work!