One Year in Japan
For exactly one year now I have been living in Japan. I have a Japanese phone number, a Japanese bank account, a Japanese social security number. As a student at the art faculty of a Japanese university, I have met many local creatives as well as wonderful people from all over the world who, like me, are trying to find their place in this demanding society. When I’m not sitting in lecture halls, studios, and cafeterias having my broken Japanese put to the test, my life plays out by day between cinemas, galleries, and museums, and by night between izakaya, karaoke bars, and supermarkets that stay open twenty-four hours a day, on nearly every corner of the city, bright and humming.
When I look back on this year, I see myself walking with friends along the river lined with freshly blossoming cherry trees, heading to the next spring festival. It’s the same river that led us in summer to the fireworks, in autumn to the castle, and in winter to the Christmas market, and where on quiet days white egrets basked beside turtles looking bored. In the park the frogs croaked, in the brook, patterned koi raced each other, between the laundromat and the fast-food place I told the girl with the roguish smile and the short, thick, jet-black hair that I liked her. 好きだよ!
still echoes through the cold night, before the brightly lit temple on the hill called us. 付き合ってください!
Even after this year, Japanese society remains a book with seven seals to me. Somewhere between well-meant politeness and militant rule-conformity, people operate day in, day out with the same mixture of a desire for individuality and a fear of otherness. The Japanese are a close-knit and perfectly synchronized collective that, up to a certain point, tolerates outside influences with interested curiosity and at the same time rejects everything that isn’t through and through Japanese. This cultural instinct for self-preservation hasn’t diminished my love for Japan in the least, for at every moment here I have felt welcome. And I can hardly wait to see what adventures still await me in this fascinating country in the months and years ahead.