blogging, freedom of speech and just a hint of red wine

Perhaps red wine is made for evenings such as these. Goodbyes and continuations.

Kichijoji seems very dear tonight. A visitor from afar sits in a bar as red as the seeing of red. It is peppered with newspaper articles. Black, white and red. The heater is on just a bit too high. I too am lost in the wine and the snow of this week.




Tokyo is officially mine. The visit of a guest from another life is no longer strange. Instead it is "nice" - in the purest, most sweet of senses. It is obvious. Natural. Someone visits my home. A home that happens to be in Tokyo. My competing absences have melded and melted to make me wonder why I ever considered a home in Tokyo to be anything other than how it should be.

And with that comes the yearning of adventure. And the misapprehension and amazement of a life philosophy come real, turned into a solid, clomping thing that can be held, in all the weighty significance of a life changing decision. To misquote Paulo Coelho, and without the accompanying belief in fatlism, "when one has decided something the whole universe re-aligns to make it happen".

Well, in the most real of senses, my universe feels like it has re-aligned. It faces B, with a heavy sense of forboding joy. And out of lost email addresses and unthought of discussions come people wanting to tell me about it. And a passion for a place and a desire to know are all one needs to search for understanding. Everywhere I look there are guides and pointers to it.

I am tierd and I am splintered, even as I draw into myself to prepare for a place, as yet I have trouble conceiving.

How does one who has always had free speech comprehend a place without it? Each of these strange strands of strangers that the world of Tokyo appears to have thrown at my feet - tells me things that feel like heavy caskets to be cradled, despite the heaviness of carrying them.

A journalist who tells me about blood on a monastery floor - all that he found the day after the crackdown on the monks last September. Another, an academic who talks about how everyone he knows has been arrested. A refugee, a member of A. S. S. K's National Democratic League, jailed for five years in 1988 - the year of the last peaceful protest - the last time B people stood up, even as the junta responded with fire. He is an enormous man and his eyes are gentle when he talks. As is the documentary maker I admit to being utterly in awe of. She has spent 6 years on the Thai/Burmese border, filming those ethnic groups that flee and continue to flee, back and forth between two governments. Dispelled people running in the borders of the jungle of no man's land.



How can I begin to imagine what it will be like to hear more stories - stories beyond just my small Tokyo network, beyond the exiled community here, and the human rights reports I read, beyond the scope of my imagination? And how can I begin to imagine what it will be like to have those stories and yet be unable to tell them? Trapped inside a regime where email is monitored, blogs are made indecipherable, phones are tapped and "foreign journalists" are shadowed. It is inconceivable.

When I was fifteen I read Howards End and was sold on "only connect" as a foundation of life. Where does that fifteen year old go when for the first time in her life the routes she used to "connect" are cut off. When she has grown so accustomed to writing as a way of soothing those bubbles of day to day troubles.

The freedom to write and speak as I wished has never felt more of a luxury. Perhaps even already what learning about B is teaching me is where luxuries become rights.

But my visitor has one more day here, and I and my demands for free expression are cluttering up our evening. So I leave this blog - more aware of how precious it is to be able to write here.

If you wish to follow this then write me an email to say you are following this blog and if I should need or want to prepare by re-considering my approach to blogging I will let you know how you can reach me.