Snuggling down into the blanket of back to school

Japan has wrapped itself around me like some enormous duvee. I am surrounded and absorbed once again - dusted over with a quiet sense of pushing through the feeling of inadequacy to place my dignity firmly to the bottom of my conscious thought in each small leap of faith and precipice that is a conversation. The weekdays are full of a sense of not quite knowing enough japanese to say what I want to say, and sitting in classes amazed that I still can't remember the irregular plain form of kimas. They're a period of always knowing how little I know. It's during the week that the other daiwa scholars raise my spirirts, that I sit before my books unable to remember why I'm studying, and that I am at my most ready to fly off on impulsive visits to inappropriate places people instead of studying.

And then each weekend, I find parts of my tongue in the quiet evenings with my flatmates. Korean barbeque and beer with my flatmate and her boyfriend, being persuaded that raw horse meat is a rarity and so good for you, biking through suburbia to visit the university library nearby, or play frizbee on the lawn, or cook silly amounts of 'enlightenment' food only to lie across our heated floor, drinking warm sake and watching samuri movies. It's a good life. And in that warm environment, the desire to communicate becomes so powerful. Yesterday, I sat with my landlady's sister - she moved from Japan to Libya in the 1970's with her husband, and has lived there ever since. Her two sons live half suspended between the two cultures. she's over visiting at the moment. What a life ! What a fascinating story ! My basic japanese tied itself in knots trying to understand and ask about her impressions of Libya when she arrived there first, how it compares to Japan, what she misses, where the differences lie. Once again I sensed my inadequacy - but somehow the feeling that atleast now I can understand when she tells me that she still follows NHK (the japanese public broadcasting coorporation) from libya every spring in order to watch the cherry blossom slowly make it's way up the island, made it okay.

The feeling of gradually burrowing down into my niche here is getting stronger. It's one of the hardest places I've ever lived, mostly because of the drill of language school. But it is also one of the most fascinating. It feels as though everything is on a different time scale to my previous 'settling's in', and perhaps that is the easiest method of understanding my experience. In America I felt a part of the campus within weeks. South America was possibly a few months. St Andrews maybe weeks again. But even as I write those places and think of those experiences I realise how false it is to even compare. Being here is like nowhere or nothing I've done before. That was part of the intoxicating appeal of coming. I have rarely moved anywhere with the prospect of living there for longer than a few months at a time. And that in itself changes my relationship with this country.

Nonetheless, when one cannot even read maps on train stations, one's entire interaction with the environment changes. Although I am at ease with my day to day life, I walk around with every connection and communication around me poised as a potential leap of faith. This is what makes living here so amazing, but also so hard. Maybe I won't ever reach a point when visiting a shrine and ringing a bell three times, is anything other than a beautiful novelty. Maybe one day I'll get bored with the tea ceremony, or will decide that I really don't like kimonos and hate using chopsticks - maybe when that happens I'll also have stopped finding every interaction such a precipise of holding my heart in my hands and jumping. Maybe the difficulty and the fascination of being a foreigner here are intrinsic sides of the same coin.