Once There Was a Way

Can you be homesick for a place that was not your home?  What does it mean, exactly, for some place to be your home? 

To a person who has always lived in the same place, maybe the first question seems nonsensical and the second one seems obvious.  But I am not one of those people.  I have lived a lot of very different places, and I don't always know what it means to be "home."  I didn't, for example, feel like Missoula, Montana, was home until after I had left it; going back there after a three-year absence made it suddenly feel as though it had once been home.  At least, I still did know many of the local bands (rock on, Volumen!).

The two places I really get homesick for, though, are (perhaps appropriately) two of the places I lived the least long.  One is Arkansas.  I lived there every summer when I was growing up, because that is where my father lived after he left us.  The other is Japan.  I lived in Japan (two different cities) for three years.  I married a Japanese fellow.  He is not homesick for Japan, but I find myself spending much of my downtime at work searching for blogs of Japanese people and expats, looking to get a sweet nostalgic taste of cherry blossom.

What do I miss, exactly?  Obviously, the ramen, but besides that... I think Japan was one of the first places I felt at home because it was one of the first places I felt that it was obvious why I didn't fit in, so I didn't feel so bothered by not fitting in.  Everything about Japanese culture says, "Hey, white girl, you don't belong here," so I never felt like I had to.  It just was, and I just was.  I made my own life there exactly how I wanted it without worrying so much.  I didn't care about the fucked up political situation like I always do here in my "home" country.  I didn't care that people watched so much TV and did so much shopping and hair-and-nail maintenance that they were left with little brain space for anything interesting.  I just didn't care.  That was so freeing.  I try to carry that over into life back in the states, but I can't quite pull it off here.  Something about speaking the same language and nominally coming from the same culture makes me feel as though I ought to have something in common with other Americans, and yet...I have trouble there. 

Anyway, probably what I'm missing is the sheer freedom that I felt in both Japan and Arkansas.  Being in Arkansas in my youth meant a very severe lack of parental control; it meant summer and Johnny Cash and hitting the open road and spending all day swimming in the river (watch out for snakes!).  It meant drinking nothing but Dr. Pepper for months on end (and so, sadly, Arkansas also meant severe bladder infection).  Japan meant being fully and completely myself because I could.  In Arkansas, there were no rules.  In Japan, most of the rules did not apply to me since I was foreign.  Is this what I am calling homesickness?  Probably.   That and missing the food in both places.  But is this what homesickness actually is--a longing for a return to youth and/or freedom?

That could explain why my Japanese husband has a distinct lack of homesickness for Japan.  He was markedly less free there than he is here, particularly because he does not fit in in Japanese society.  At all.  I do know that a lot of my Japanese friends feel homesick for Japan, though, even when they do fit in, so I think homesickness may also have a component of missing knowing things.  Shit.  That was awkwardly phrased.  What I mean is that I think to miss home is to miss the place where you knew how everything worked, where you knew what was expected and what your role was.  Even if you only use the rules to subvert them, there is a home-like comfort in knowing them, isn't there?  Well, if that is what homesickness is, then I suppose that is not what I feel for Arkansas and Japan.  Having spent the least amounts of life-time in those two places, they are the two places where I am in most respects not in that comfort zone of knowing all the rules and roles and cultural workings.  Yet they are the two places I feel most comfortable.  A trip to Oil Trough (Arkansas--yes, we're damned hillbillies) or Osaka...it always cures what ails me.

reposted, with slight editing, from GinBaby (which was also me)

Not Your Japan

I've been wanting to blog about what my life was like in Japan for a long time.  Most of the blogs about gaijin living in Japan are written by men, and many of them come from very specific points of view, like guys who love otaku culture or guys who are just really desperate to find a Japanese woman who will nag them for the rest of their lives.  I read these blogs from time to time when I find myself missing Japan, but I always come away dissatisfied because none of them really come at all close to the particular experiences I had while I was there.  No, Internets, I'm not saying that I'm some kind of special snowflake, because I know that that will get me immediately kicked off the World Wide Web, just that...I lived a life there that was perhaps a bit out of the ordinary for a gaijin.

I wasn't a hostess or a geisha or anything cool like that.  But I went to Japan pretty much tabula rasa.  I don't care about manga, I didn't know much at all about Japanese culture, and I didn't speak Japanese to any great extent.  We'll get into why I went there in another post.  I did have, as I suppose most Americans do to the extent that they have any ideas at all about Japanese culture, the idea that Japan was very unfree, very patriarchal, very unfriendly towards women (especially women who aren't looking to be housewives).

After spending three years almost entirely in the company of very ordinary Japanese men, I came to believe that, except for the "unfree" bit (and that is just complicated), those accepted ideas about Japanese society are wrong.  All wrong.  I know there are a lot of people, some of whom having lived there much longer than I did, who would disagree with me, but I don't care.  I think they would disagree because they would have had quite different experiences.  Being men (mostly--or Western women looking to get their biases confirmed) they would necessarily have had very different experiences.  Being men who are interested specifically in fetching a Japanese wife (which, sadly, describes a great number of the foreign men who go to Japan--or, worse, the fellows who just want an "Asian" wife and hop from country to country looking for one), whether explicitly or not, gives them another layer of bias.  They're sympathetic to the ladies from the get-go, and I am not particularly.  To be perfectly honest, most Japanese women bore the daylights out of me.  And I really have a hard time taking grown-ups who carry stuffed animals around with them very seriously.  Unless it's a gift for your kids and you're just on your way home to give it to them, it's not a healthy sign in my book.

So, welcome to a blog about Japan that is more focused on Japanese men than women, that says nothing about manga or anime (except Full Metal Panic, if that counts), and that seeks to undermine a lot of popular notions about the Japanese based totally on special-snowflake anecdotal evidence.  If you find another in a similar vein, let me know.