WHAT IS JAPAN TO ME?

I am now in Japan.

Here was one of my dreams that I managed to achieve. So what is next?

Without goals we cannot keep walking forwards. Instead we are just walking on an endless treadmill without a destination to reach, just enjoying the scenery of the same walls around us each day.

I’m not so good at metaphors here.

So let’s hope if I manage to keep writing here I will in time sound more intelligent than a kindergartner who just got their first laptop.

So Japan to me is my escape. I didn’t know what I was doing in life at all.

School friends around me were going to university, getting full time jobs or popping out babies, making families, experiencing heartache… yet I could help feeling like I was not moving.

I felt like stagnant air.

I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t move and each attempt I struggled to throw myself forwards was like a punch in the face with rejection after rejection for jobs that never even interested me in the first place.

So after faced with what seemed a barricade from joining into society I studied skills for the purpose of getting a job. Yet things still seemed stale, and the idea of joining the consumerist rat race made me think jumping out of a window naked sounded like a better life path.

So Japan was my running away.

Old fantasies write about running away to join the circus. I guess my circus was Japan then.

Doing a working holiday in Japan was the best experience of my life. I managed to find my place in life by coming here. In the process of running away I found out where I was really meant to be.

“I didn’t know who I was or where I was going, so I traveled hoping to find myself in action.”

I read this quote in 'Hokkaido Highway Blues' by Will Ferguson.

So I’m going to leave it there. Because I know perfectly well that people hardly read what they see online any more because we are all too busy watching YouTube videos of cats.

But after my working holiday experience, new lifelong friends and a larger view of the world, I knew I had to come back here.

Nothing gives you saving motivation more than that goal in mind. It was easier working a year washing dishes and cleaning shit stains from dunny (toilet) bowls with a smile knowing that each day brought me somewhere closer to where I wanted to be.

So here I am; a girl from a high school that had a penis on its office roof view-able from google maps - now in one of Japan’s top 10 universities. A dumbass among geniuses. But if a dumbass tries hard even they can get somewhere.

Don’t let the past define the present.

Never look back.

Lunch at Jozankei Onsen town with university friends.