On Friday we took the Shinkasen to Kyoto. Time to see something else, some different part of Japan. Despite having never been here, one misconception I hear regularly is the idea that all of Japan is like Shinjuku, all neon and steel and Blade Runner.
I wanted to see something else and watch the landscape pass by, the spaces in between cities. Someday I'll get to Kanazawa and Hokkaido, and Kyoto is not exactly the countryside, but different.
The Sakura festival was on, and the cherry blossoms in full bloom just starting to fade, raining petals. Kyoto was so crowded, the only walk possible a little shuffle. I'd never seen anything like this, the sort of Japanese equivalent of a fairground. Kids on school break laying out tarps and getting ready to have parties after the sun went down. In the temples we walked and made multiple wishes and prayers.
But more importantly, it was a chance to visit my friend Yuko.
Yuko was an exchange student in my high school in Puyallup, Washington. My senior year I took Japanese and she helped the teacher with the class. Despite language barriers, she was one of the few people at that age who shared an interest in a whole world I wanted to see and I inhabited to escape from small town blues. One of the reasons I was so obsessed with movies, especially foreign films from anywhere, is it offered a window to me, stuck in that town, to see the rest of the world, which I hungered for. Finally in Yuko I could talk to someone about everything else I had little passions for. I instantly had this massive crush on her, probably the biggest crush I had in high school, but back then I was so painfully shy about girls I liked that I would sort of hide from her.
This is funny, but at the same time serious: I always felt so bad for the exchange students who had to come to our town, which was narrow minded and offered little. I mean seriously, you come from a place like Amsterdam or a seaside town in Japan and get stuck in a woodsy suburb that has a Country and Western fair as its biggest attraction and a local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Our town had just started to turn into the strip mall of the area, and I remember a Yugoslavian girl - who back home had a civil war going on - telling me that the town had more parking lots than actual places.
The sad part is I could've spent much more time with Yuko, and I didn't. Soon after I graduated and went to Ireland and I remember the last day of Japanese class and knowing I'd miss her and not doing anything about it because of shyness, which was actually cowardice.
Five years or so later I returned home and my mom gave me some mail. One of them was a letter from Yuko sent five years before. That still strikes me as funny that my Mom sort of forgot about it for five years. I still have it. This was before you could see Miyazaki's movies in the US and she had cut out pages from a movie magazine of images from his films.
But now things have changed, and we don't really remember life before the Internet and gadgets, and she found me over the Internet, and I do the same thing sometimes, googling people I miss and didn't stay in touch with. I have come to honestly face that a large part of expatriation is running away from something.
And I got to see her. It's hard to catch up with someone when you have a few hours with them and it's been thirteen years since you last saw each other. But we were still able to make each other laugh and talk about things we like, like building Gundam models and what movies we love and samurai. We got a Keroro mask and goofed around.
As dusk hit a horde of photographers staked out the biggest tree. It looked and felt like a red carpet premiere.
It's hard to have such limited time, but I am glad we got to have a day in Kyoto, seeing each other after such time and space. Again, that feeling of the astronaut who travels at the speed of light and returns home and more time has passed for the rest of the world. But Yuko doesn't look a day older. 13 years ago feels like yesterday.
If there are old friends you miss, you should look them up.
The Shinkasen is the most amazing train I've ever been on, a gliding wraith that feels weightless. On the train ride home I thought about all the memories I have of Yuko and watched the harvest moon, three quarters full, hovering over the ocean and watching it's reflection ripple in the sea. And then I had to start working on another treatment...
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I wanted to see something else and watch the landscape pass by, the spaces in between cities. Someday I'll get to Kanazawa and Hokkaido, and Kyoto is not exactly the countryside, but different.
The Sakura festival was on, and the cherry blossoms in full bloom just starting to fade, raining petals. Kyoto was so crowded, the only walk possible a little shuffle. I'd never seen anything like this, the sort of Japanese equivalent of a fairground. Kids on school break laying out tarps and getting ready to have parties after the sun went down. In the temples we walked and made multiple wishes and prayers.
But more importantly, it was a chance to visit my friend Yuko.
Yuko was an exchange student in my high school in Puyallup, Washington. My senior year I took Japanese and she helped the teacher with the class. Despite language barriers, she was one of the few people at that age who shared an interest in a whole world I wanted to see and I inhabited to escape from small town blues. One of the reasons I was so obsessed with movies, especially foreign films from anywhere, is it offered a window to me, stuck in that town, to see the rest of the world, which I hungered for. Finally in Yuko I could talk to someone about everything else I had little passions for. I instantly had this massive crush on her, probably the biggest crush I had in high school, but back then I was so painfully shy about girls I liked that I would sort of hide from her.
This is funny, but at the same time serious: I always felt so bad for the exchange students who had to come to our town, which was narrow minded and offered little. I mean seriously, you come from a place like Amsterdam or a seaside town in Japan and get stuck in a woodsy suburb that has a Country and Western fair as its biggest attraction and a local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Our town had just started to turn into the strip mall of the area, and I remember a Yugoslavian girl - who back home had a civil war going on - telling me that the town had more parking lots than actual places.
The sad part is I could've spent much more time with Yuko, and I didn't. Soon after I graduated and went to Ireland and I remember the last day of Japanese class and knowing I'd miss her and not doing anything about it because of shyness, which was actually cowardice.
Five years or so later I returned home and my mom gave me some mail. One of them was a letter from Yuko sent five years before. That still strikes me as funny that my Mom sort of forgot about it for five years. I still have it. This was before you could see Miyazaki's movies in the US and she had cut out pages from a movie magazine of images from his films.
But now things have changed, and we don't really remember life before the Internet and gadgets, and she found me over the Internet, and I do the same thing sometimes, googling people I miss and didn't stay in touch with. I have come to honestly face that a large part of expatriation is running away from something.
And I got to see her. It's hard to catch up with someone when you have a few hours with them and it's been thirteen years since you last saw each other. But we were still able to make each other laugh and talk about things we like, like building Gundam models and what movies we love and samurai. We got a Keroro mask and goofed around.
As dusk hit a horde of photographers staked out the biggest tree. It looked and felt like a red carpet premiere.
It's hard to have such limited time, but I am glad we got to have a day in Kyoto, seeing each other after such time and space. Again, that feeling of the astronaut who travels at the speed of light and returns home and more time has passed for the rest of the world. But Yuko doesn't look a day older. 13 years ago feels like yesterday.
If there are old friends you miss, you should look them up.
The Shinkasen is the most amazing train I've ever been on, a gliding wraith that feels weightless. On the train ride home I thought about all the memories I have of Yuko and watched the harvest moon, three quarters full, hovering over the ocean and watching it's reflection ripple in the sea. And then I had to start working on another treatment...
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1 Comments:
I kinda miss Japan...I haven't been for 13 years, I wonder if it might actually be for me sometimes...
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