Where to start? Well, about a month ago I experienced Japanese cedar pollen allergies which killed me, and I died. Two weekends in a row, for the first time since we moved here, we stayed home because with my hideous coughing and sneezing I was a walking personification of the reason that people wear masks here. I felt like Ace Ventura in When Nature Calls, being introduced to the tribes - “they did not know about disease, until the white man came”... then he sneezed on them.
After I resurrected myself, I had a weird sort of mental shift. Everything here was still wonderful and exciting and beautiful, but it hit me.
I'm not on vacation. I live here.
April marked 6 months in Japan. I will be here at least another 30 months and more likely 54. If I had to uproot my entire life to move anywhere in the world, I would probably choose Japan (again). But even when the scenery is awesome, moving your entire existence to a foreign country on the literal other side of the planet is, for lack of a better word, a bit traumatic. I suppose I would compare it to being in a perfect-temperature pool with a martini in your hand, but after being lit on fire and hurled into it through a swarm of flying ants at 100mph. “This is pretty nice, I'm enjoying this, but what the in the fuck just happened?”
Sticking with the pool and martini analogy, at the six month mark, my drink was empty and I wanted a towel. Just to take a break, refill, dry off for a bit, and then get back in. I needed just a taste of home, just for a little bit. Just to recharge. But, I live here and I'm not going home anytime soon. I would be in this pool until my fingers were pruney. It was a weird little funk that I fell into, and when you are somewhere as cool as Japan, you do not give yourself permission to not love the shit out of your life.
Then, the best things happened. I'm not a religious person by any means, but I feel like some hippie-dippy spiritual juju monster was like, “psssh, sister, I got you.”
First, one of my best friends from junior high (which was TWENTY YEARS AGO OMG I'M A FOSSIL) sent me a message because she and her husband were going to be in Tokyo on vacation. Jan and I took a day off work and met up with them, showing them around and enjoying the company of an old friend and a new friend. We did a couple of the touristy things that we did when we first got here, along with checking out some spots that you only know if you live here – including a bar that's so dark the bartendress hands you a flashlight when you walk in, and you order songs off a menu along with your drinks. It was perfect – I got to re-experience the first-time “holy shit this is Tokyo” glow by proxy, and feel like a super bad ass level 1000 Tokyo Expert who knows the cool places that gaijin (literally, “outside person” - common slang for foreigner) would never dare walk into.
This gave me a good boost out of my homesick pity-party mood. I was out of the pool for a second, drying off with a towel, and now the pool looked super appealing again. I just needed a refill on my drink...
Thank you, hippie-dippy spiritual juju monster! One of my coworkers from Portland shipped out to Japan on a 2-month assignment. Refill achieved.
His first weekend here, another coworker of mine who is WAY more experienced in the art of living in Japan took us all somewhere way off the tourist itinerary. “Bring 100 yen coins. We're going to bet on horses and boats.”
So, on a beautiful Saturday, off we went to Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu – generally considered the best horserace track in Tokyo. It was my newly-arrived coworker's first weekend in Tokyo – but it felt brand new to us too that day. After a crash-course in how to fill out a betting card, we happily proceeded to drink highballs and stare at the constantly shifting odds on the monitors above us, finally hedging our bets and torching our money on fire. I think one of us won like 20 cents, in the whole 2 hours we were there. There were old Japanese men in every interior corner of the racecourse with tarps laid out, shoes off, pouring over betting odds, drinking beer, napping. This was serious business.
After our highball buzz muted out the humiliation of losing like a zillion times on horses, we hopped on a bus to the boat race track. Jan was particularly excited about this because vroom vroom and speed. While the horserace track was very high-end and fancy, the boat race track was... not. And there were literally no Westerners there besides us. I was stared at while walking to the bathroom like I was a rare Siberian tiger.
The betting was more interesting here. There was a line of guys in booths, and if you slipped them 100 yen, they would slip you a piece of paper with their educated guesses at which boats to bet on. It felt very nefarious. So we paid a couple boat race savants for a couple of scraggly pieces of paper, and scrawled out our bets. The skies opened up and it rained on us while we watched our money vaporize again.
It was like we experienced Japan for the first time, all over again.
This last weekend, we took my newly-arrived coworker out on our own, honing our every-increasing Japan Expert Level skills. We walked through the famous Shibuya Crossing, visited Tokyo Tower, played MarioKart at a 5 story arcade (I completely humiliated both of my competitors for the record), drank in Shinjuku while it was lit up like Blade Runner, and had dinner at our coworker's apartment where we watched the sun set over the city.
That was what I needed. Drink refilled, and who needs a towel when you have a pool?
I've been completely recharged. Living away from everyone and everything you've ever known is indescribably strange in a good way, and I've given myself permission to fully embrace the peaks and valleys; the ebbs and flows – which are inevitable. For now, I'm going to enjoy how I feel today, because I feel awesome.
Life is beautiful.
(For the record - these pictures are a mash-ups from the last month)
