「夢から覚めるにはまだ早い」
I was looking through some papers from my first trip to Japan to look for Rie's number, and I was thinking... about Japan.
"masih dijajah," as someone once told me. Perhaps.
My perception of Japan is still clouded under a much hazy glow, like an unclear dream, but a dream and an idealized perspective nonetheless.
When I think about Japan, I still do think about the little quirks and the little things in my memory that I saw there that captured me. So perhaps, after seeing the Japan I saw, I still only really have good memories of the place. It's still the good, weird, different, facinating things that I saw that I liked that frames how I view Japan.
Like many (and I mean MANYYYYYYYYYYYY much to Asuka's horror), I got to know things japanese through Anime (oh i am so sorry Asuka, but that's the reality of the world outside japan: Anime is cool!). But I suppose, it was the culture or the perceived beauty of their cultural heritage that first captured me. I remember the very first thing that captured me about Japan that made me like fall idealically in-love with this absolutely unknown place to me was the feeling I felt when I watched BOA's My Will ending theme song on Inuyasha; it was of the red spider flower and the lights of the ferris wheel refected on the water...
Now that I have seen Japan, well, their past and their history and their culture still intrigue me, and I'm still facinated by it (especially Shintoism and its symbolisms)... But I like the place for many other things, you know, especially how it's very different-- how Japan is a quirk of its own-- and it's these little things that still paints for me this idealized perception.
I will never understand how they think (haha!) but the things I like about Japan are like how there's just this bombardment and myriad of things swirlling around. There are a thousand things confined in a one-inch space, roads don't make sense swirlling between houses that are packed like sardines in a can then suddenly out of nowhere, there's a nice lil cherry tree with a string of vending machines lining the corridors. I like how Japan is this streaming boom of technology but yet, culture and heritage, and the oldness of the past permeates through their conciousness. I like how japan, and perhaps the Japanese, is this coagulation of a thousand conflicting and harmonious things that just flows in as... well, Japan. It's like, things there just look so foreignly familliar. So global yet uniquely Japanese and only Japanese. It's like every other country you go to, you will recognize famillair things or brands or whatever, but Japan itself, you think you kinda know the thing but dude, the product or the thing is just so... Japanese.
It's like... How i feel about Japan still has that idealized glow that My Will ending made me feel, except now it's touched and rubbed through with these other things that I experienced there and saw there... And on the flipside is that, everything I saw there or experience there is, in itself, also rubbed through and touched with this idealized glow and feeling.
Everything else before stands, but something else has come in-- and they just mix together and reinforces the other to form this perception and feeling that I have of Japan.
In many ways, the things that draws me to this country has changed and is changing and perhaps has faded or morphed-- I don't think I'm like all crazy over Japan like I know some friends are-- There are many realities of Japan that I don't like, or don't think I'd ever get used to--You have to understand that this was a country that was CLOSED to the outside world for hundreds and hundreds of years till the very end of the 19th Century. In many many ways more than many other modern developed countries, history and cultural religious beliefs are very much integral in Japan and the Japanese.
I think that the Japanese and Japan are just too different for you to ever feel like you entirely belong, or to even feel entirely comfortable, I think. (That's why it felt so great to feel in that one moment standing there in the concert that you belonged to this group of fans as we sang together from our different worlds under the banner of the same song). But I don't think it's any fault of theirs, of course. It's just that, to be Japanese is to require you to be born into the conciouness of a being a pure Japanese-- to be born into the history and culture and belief and teaching and flow that every pure Japanese inherits from Japan's cultural, religious and historical past.. -- And I think that unless you are a pure Japanese, you will never truly understand that..
I don't mean that in offense to people who aren't "pure" Japanese-- But it's a culture entirely very, very unique and distinct in it's thinking. I never really use the term "conciousness (of a collective)" for any country's people, because it rarely applies that a single country has a singular conciousness-- but Japan is that exception.
I don't know... I guess knowing that-- you just have to view Japan idealistically! hahaha... U might be a lil dissapointed, or feel outcast or bewildered, if you didn't look at Japan in an idealized light! ;)
I don't know. In many ways, I've not seen much of Japan at all. I would love to travel to other places like Kamakura and Nikko (?) and especially the coastal towns and perhaps up to Hokkaido (IN SUMMER OF COURSE haha). I wish to visit more.... tourist places haha! Yet, at the same time I would love to stay longer, especially, or go to other lesser-known Japan places that are more well, Japanese... Or at least, more Japan, more representative of the essense of the idealized Japan that you see in Jdrama haha!
But I think, I do like my experiences of Japan. Of getting semi lost, of all the "huh?", of all the "wow!", of all the rusa masuk kampung... I guess, it's just, I don't know where my experience stand-- it's neither like experiecing it like a "native" (Honey, if u ain't japanese, I think u will NEVER experience Japan as a native), nor has it been a tourist experience... It's just caught between the two.. A lil of both.
I'm glad I got to travel on my own, I'm glad (and thank you to all) I got to stay with locals with them and with their families, I'm very very happy I got to stay and visit Japan "suburbs" (all those Ranma's scenes haha!), I'm glad I got to deal with their higly "huh??" subway/train/local train/bullet train systems, I'm GLAD I GOT TO GO FOR CONCERTS IN JAPAN!!!--- that one of course, it's a whole experience in its own being together in part of something special with all these people you can't even speak the same language with! haha!, I'm glad I got to the the countryside of Japan and not just the cities, I'm glad I got to see Kyoto, I'm glad I got to see Tokyo, I'm glad I got to see their kombini hahaha! (ahhhhhh especially Yoshitaro outside them kombini!)...
A myriad of things, yes.
I don't know.
I guess.. I still don't quite know why Japan captures me.
No, Asuka, thankfully, it's not because of the anime.
And, i suppose, it's not even the music (although I'd kill to have a chance to live in Tokyo for the next few months just to go for Lunkhead shows every weekend hahaha!).
I don't know what it is that captures me-- except for those hazy glow of memories and expectations and images that blurs between what I saw and experienced and what I've watched on TV and read in books. It's a lil of the the things I saw, the things I imagine and the things I believe about Japan and the Japanese.
And as Yoshitaro sang in the line i quoted at the begining of this 'email', "It's still early to wake from (this) dream.."
Well, Yoshitaro, we'll see how that goes.
Elaine
-I've got tunnel vision and I'm doing fine-
--
"but eventually, they must push forward because so much awaits them."
Love is just an abstract concept. It can't knock down stuff.
http://goodbyetracy.blogspot.com
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