back in familiar Japan

Who would have thought that arriving in Japan would give me feelings of returning home? When i descended the escalator to customs, a sign above me read in Japanese "Welcome Home," and underneath it was some Korean, and underneath that was the English "Welcome to Japan." It made me feel like something more than just a regular gaijin, wide-eyed and hesitant, entering a foreign land of mystery. I was returning to something like a home, albeit a strange and foreign one, though not exactly mysterious anymore. It felt somewhat refreshing to be surrounded by a language i partially understood, a language which was composed of sounds i knew, instead of a language that didn't register anything cerebral at all besides the interesting rhythm and how funny the sounds were.

I'm sitting in the Excelsior Cafe in Narita Airport above Terminal 71, the one that connects to the plane leaving for New York in an hour and a half. I've been thinking about this experience as a whole--trying to piece together all the bizarre experiences and memories floating around in my mind in an effort to stitch them into some patchwork quilt that represents a kind of lesson. But perhaps that's effort wasted, and i should let them float around on their own and bump into each other, creating collisions that produce little bursts of sudden revelation--the sheer entropy of memory that assembles and dissolves periodically to fuel our creative thought for the future.

And on that unnecessarily complex and pseudo-philosophical note, i will end this blog and return home once again. Thank you, my loyal readers, and i hope these entries have taught you a thing or two about Japan and Korea, or at least about how one American distorts and perverts their images.

さようなら！
Sayonara!