Yokohama - A Photo Diary

"Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something. I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing."

-Elizabeth Wurtzel, 'Prozac Nation'

I've been back from Tokyo for a while and already more interesting things have been happening ... so this post is going to be more of a "photo diary" of the last day of Tokyo...with a little bit of self-reflection thrown in at the end. Sunday evening, expect an update on the visit to Fushimi-Inari with Keiko and Arashiyama with Dani-chan.

Yokohama has some interesting architecture:

And the harbour made me sooooo homesick for Sydney =(

The Cosmo Clock (we rode on it later):

These red brick buildings used to be warehouses for the docks .. now they're shopping arcades.

Chucks away!

When I got back to Suginami from Yokohama I was pretty tired. But Megu said her friends from the other night (you remember, the balloon boys) had invited us over to an all night party at their house. I stayed up until 2 talking, chatting, and joking in my broken Japanese. Crawled onto a couch amid everyone's jackets and fell asleep to the soothing voice of Radio National's Alan Saunders. Woke at 7 to less pleasant noises - the snoring of one of the guys who'd fallen asleep near me.

I'm not going to lie - Tokyo had its downs for me as well. I'm not one of those people who is naturally comfortable living an insane, hectic, active lifestyle. I'd rather read a book. During the Tokyo Week, when I got home every day I would be so tired and disorientated from the crazyness that is Tokyo. Watching Lost in Translation with its Air soundtrack and scenes of Charlotte lolling around her room in the Park Hyatt doesn't really match the city that I experienced: a big, scary, loud, foreign place.

Some parts were really, really fun. But I would never want to live there. I infinitely prefer Kyoto, if only because of its pure navigability.

There's a moment in Elizabeth Wurtzel's 'Prozac Nation' where she talks about how she went to Cambridge for college and expected it to cure the depression she'd been carrying around with her since she was 12, but arrived there only to find out that it was "a place like any other only more so."Suddenly it strikes her that, even living and studying in a place with so much history and culture and vibrant intellectual life - "I am still me. Fuck."

I've been trying to find this quote on google, and it bugs me that I can't.

My situation is a little different. I didn't come to Japan with any problems I thought the place's magical properties would cure. I just wanted to come here for so long, I was so resolute and consumed with my interest in the culture in the language, it never occurred to me that I would ever feel scared or uncomfortable or embarrassed or homesick or discouraged here at all. It was going to be a Grand Adventure because I would be in My Element. Instead, the above feelings pretty much dominated my first 2 months here. Made worse by my guilt for feeling them.

And Tokyo was when I stopped waiting for Japan to reveal its magic to me.

I don't see this as negative any more though. To get out of this mindset I've had to grow up and toughen up. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Oh, poor diddums, with your scholarships and university degree and parental support and having to live in the safest country in the world in comfortable housing. Poor little middle-class white girl.

I'm beginning to sound uncomfortably like Elizabeth Wurtzel again. Oh dear, no.

But to return to my point - I've always been a day dreamer, more at home in projecting into the past or future than dealing with the here and now. I like to switch off from the present. Trouble is, when you're riding your bike on a road with cars and pedestrians, you can't be plugged into your ipod or you're going to kill somebody (probably yourself). When you're at the supermarket in a foreign country and you need to decipher the food labels to find the ingredients to make dinner you need to concentrate or you don't get dinner. When you're too tired to fetch the vacuum cleaner from two floors down to hoover up the crumbs crackers you just spilled, nobody's going to force you to go get it. You don't mind cockroaches, do you?

I'm not spoiled, I never expected anyone here to pick up the slack if I got absent-minded or lazy, but I have never in my life needed to be so conscious of my complete self-reliance. Now I constantly think responsibly. When is the rent due? When do I need to go shopping next? Now I multitask - making potato soup and doing my laundry and cleaning my room and doing homework all at once. Most importantly, I've managed to learn how to live this way without having a stress attack.

I've set a balance between schoolwork (weekdays) and sightseeing (weekends). And I've started to be more proactive in regards to the former - I organised the trip to Arashiyama with Dani today (had never been there, didn't even know the right stop to get off at, and it was a COMPLETE SUCCESS!) and intend to organise many more such trips around Japan.

I've had to become less of a control freak. I think that's been the hardest adjustment, all in all. Simultaneously being at home with being completely helpless and completely self-sufficient.

I'm definitely getting better at it. I think. But the adjustment has been a little wearying.

These things take forever, I especially am slow.

Another good thing about this change: the moments of peace and rest become even more beautiful. Like that last morning in Tokyo - when all my Japanese friends were still snoring on the lounge room floor - I stepped outside onto the little balcony and just looked around at the city in the morning. Just looking, not thinking, not planning, not worrying, not feeling anything except a deep sense of peace. And relief at going "home".

I'm going back to Kyoto City, I do believe I've had enough!

-Bob Dylan (almost)

Anyway, enough self-examination for now. Rest assured, tomorrow I will update (with many beautiful photos and videos!) of Fushimi-Inari and Arashiyama ... which might just be my favourite places in Japan.

Do you like mountains, bamboo forests, fox gods, wooded areas filled with red torii shrines, and ... MONKEYS?

Till tomorrow.