When I left Kansai Gaidai a couple years ago, it was lugging a pair of maroon suitcases into the Mid-December light, calling over my shoulder to a group of softly crying friends "This isn't the end. We'll see each other again, someday, so you don't even have to say goodbye." I hate saying goodbye. But even though I said I was sure we'd all meet again, was there a part of me pretty convinced that this sunrise was also the sun setting on Hirakata City, Japan? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. I went home hoping I'd make it to Japan again one day, but I also went home pretty sure that even if I did, the Japan I'd make it to would be entirely different from the one I'd left.
Well, I made it back, and even though I staggered into the coutnry lugging behind me the same two suitcases I'd left it with, I guess I was bringing my baggage to a place that knew nothing about it. My bags were the same color of maroon they'd been sitting in the closet in my dorm room, most of the clothes inside of them were two years older but of the same stitch and thread they'd been sloppily spread out on the tatami of Sem II, but when I got it all out on the (wooden) floor of my new apartment, something just didn't look right. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that even though I was mostly the same person I had been two years prior (and had all the matching stuff to prove it), Hamamatsu was not the Japan I had left, the Japan I had expected, and certainly not the Japan I had signed up for. Some times it didn't even feel like Japan at all. Finding out I was placed in Hamamatsu, the larger, optimistic part of me tried to say that it would be fun to see a new place in Japan, experience some new sights, sounds, tastes, what have you, but there was a darker part of me that knew Kansai for home and didn't care one bit to settle anywhere else, even if it was only for a short time.
I don't really care about Tokyo. I went to Akita, and it was nice, but not for me. Okinawa sounds pretty, but, meh. Hiroshima is cool. To visit. Yokohama's got a sweet Chinatown. I hear Hokkaido is famous for its summer wildflowers. Hm. Now that I think about it, I actually want to go to Hokkaido, and summer wildflowers sound heavenly, but fuck Hokkaido, and fuck summer wildflowers. As far as I'm concerned Japan is (one end to the other) about two hours on trains, and has only two cities (and their surrounding areas) that matter: Osaka and Kyoto. I've been fighting it, trying really hard to give Hamamatsu and Kanto a chance, but fuck 'em all, when you're from Kansai like I seem to have become nowhere else matters.
This is going to get out of hand if I keep going at this pace, so let me cease blasting 95% of the Japanese landmass and get down to business. I went to Osaka and Kyoto this weekend! It was great. It felt like Japan for the first time. I like soccer. I don't like natto. I am fine, thanks, how are you? Whoops, sorry, slipped back into my English teacher role, there, but for the moment we're discussing nothing that has to do with my life as an educator and everything to do with my life as a student of Japanese. I first came to Kyoto when I was 16, and, in the middle of a long day touring various Japanese cultural landmarks, we stopped in at a place called "Heian Jingu," a large shrine famour for it's largness, orangeness, oldness, and four lovely gardens you can walk through. One of those gardens has a large Koi pond in it, and running along the edge of the koi pond are a group of stepping stones you can use to cross like a bridge. Of course, to a still culturally nubile 16 year-old mind, these stones were perfect for pictures posed in the kung-fu and zen style. Somewhat amazingly, I found a couple of those pictures deep in the memory banks of my computer, so I'll dust 'em off and here they are:
Oh what the fuck? This isn't right? John English turned into a little Japanese girl? And what, I didn't have a beard... Or a pony-tail for that matter. What the hell. Oh, that's right, these photos were taken yesterday. Not 6 years ago. But other than that they are the exact same. It's unreal. I don't know exactly what it means that my life continues to meander through the same points on the map of a distant land, but maybe it's just that I like those places. After we took those pictures, I went and made myself a little medallion to replace the one I'd lost 5 years ago (thankfully the imprinting machine was there), and to bring the deja vu a couple years into the future, we walked around Sanjo, a pretty, but mostly exorbitantly overpriced shopping district that we came to from time to time two years ago. Time goes on in a straight line, but I'll be fucked if life doesn't go around in slowly expanding circles, each of us sucking new people into the vortexes that are our lives even as we are sucked in by others until the ripples all overlap and you can't tell which one is yours and which one your neighbors anymore, but it's all good because the point is that we can all be connected if we spend a little bit of time in the same pond. Though I could say a lot more about this, and will later, perhaps tomorrow, I think I'm going to end the transmission here. I really really can't wait to pull a few of my friends from back home into this crazy pit of light and sound and agelessness that has one index of my life for the past god knows how long. Throw 'em into the pond and watch the ripples spread.
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