greys as the rain of december hits

Maybe this is the inevitable come down of a sumptuous weekend, maybe this is the inevitable comedown of having spent the last two and a half months trying to study, see all of Japan, spend time with my flatmates, fulfill the endless silly duties we are 'strongly encouraged' or compelled to attend because of our program - and all on less than 6 hours sleep a night and alongside three and a half hours a day of commuting. Maybe this is also the inevitable beginnings of the end of the honeymoon period and is fuelled more by the thought of the two day long test we have next week than by any real conviction.

But, for the umpteenth time I wonder why I am here. It feels as though all the things I love doing are no longer a part of my life. There are wonderful moments here - the trips I've taken, the 'extra' things I do on top of the program; writing reflections, trying to understand how the social structure of Japan works, visiting islands to go spear fishing.

But today the director of my program informed me that I wasn't studying enough, and that it is precisely all of the things that I love doing that I should cut out. My life should be confined to my language classes and memorising vocabulary in the isolated quiet of my room. No peace symposiums, no late night discussions about social justice or a perfect education systems (not that there was very much of that going on anyway - as I seem to have come across few friends who want to talk about those kinds of things), no seeing Tokyo. The idea makes me want to punch something. It seems I have chosen, without fully realising it, a full time job of the tedium of grammer tests and filling in the gaps on page after page of kanji quizzes. My 'success' or 'failure' is measured not on weather I understand Japan, am happy, can speak with japanese people, am making the most of living in tokyo but on weather my handwriting is good and how many compounded kanji I can cram for 'weekly testo'.

This year is making me realise that I hate working entirely alone, that it makes me depressed to feel as though what I am doing makes no kind of bigger difference and that I am not passionate enough about learning japanese - or any other language to study grammatical structures on my own for hours each day. And behind it all still lies the bigger question, that at some point I need to find a satisfactory answer to, as to why I came to Japan in the first place - because whatever that reason was, it was not to put myself through the isolation of sitting on my own in my room memorising grammer structures.