Brenton Gonazlez schrieb am 02.06.2019, 18:02 Uhr:
This is a bit convoluted but bear with me here. I’m a translator and work at home, so I often find myself sitting at my desk when I’m translating something particularly boring (like today) wondering why, for the love of peanut butter, did I ever bother learning Japanese. So I google that phrase, or something like it, and I get a link to this page. I skim a few titles, but to be honest, now that I’ve been in Japan for nearly a decade now, I tend to avoid websites about Japan. For some reason I leave the page open and go back to working. It’s teeth-grindingly, want-to-jump-from-my-fourteenth-floor-apartment-balcony kind of boring. And it’s due today. So each time I save the massive file (which, incidentally, takes about four minutes each time), I wander back to this site, and I start reading articles against my own inclinations. And I start to like what I read. I’ve experienced similar things to what you’ve written, and also very different things. Like I said, I work from home, so I tend to live in a little niche that not too many people inhabit (and the ones that do don’t meet each other often), so I actually forget sometimes that I live in Japan. I’ll be sitting there eating in a food court and suddenly think “Hey, there sure are a lot of Japanese people around here”, and then remember what a lummox I am and slap myself in the face. I actually did leave Japan, convinced that I didn’t need it anymore, and influenced by plumes of radiation spewing out of the north, so I left to go back to the States (the sudden presence of a newborn child can make you do weird things. Whey can’t they just learn to wear hazmat suits on their own like the rest of us?). So I spent a ton of money to get back there, throwing away seven years of accumulated stuff, selling a car, only to find out, two months after arriving, that I had made a big mistake. I waited, hoping I’d get used to living in the States again, but I found out, that you can go home again, but home has a tendency to shift places. I’d left mine back in Tokyo. So less than ten months after moving back, I convinced my wife and daughter (she was easy, I just lied and said there was more ice cream in Japan) to sell all our stuff again, including another car, and move back to Tokyo. It’s been a year since I’ve been back, and I know now that I’ll never leave again. Despite all that I dislike about Japan, it is truly home. This piece here, although we like different things, resonated. Thanks.
