Japan Anniversary!

As of today, it’s been one year since I came back from Japan.  It’s hard to imagine that it was so long ago that I saw everyone there…that I said good-bye to all the friends I made and to the places I’d grown to love.  There are still some mornings I wake up thinking I am back in the seminar house, nestled in my futon on our tatami mats.

Over the past year my Japanese has become more than a little rusty.  While I’ve made it a point to practice when I can, it’s hard to maintain the vocabulary I built…which is more than a little saddening.  However, it’s funny how I’ve still kept so many of my “Japanese” habits.  There are times I catch myself bowing, responding to my friends with “un” instead of “yeah,” and exclaiming surprise with an exaggerated, “eeehhhhhhh?!” My diet favors anything Japanese, and I crave rice often.  A few weeks ago a friend and I dressed up in kimono and had a tea ceremony–and I couldn’t believe how reassuring the taste of good matcha was for me.  I made friends with the Japanese exchange students this past year, as well…and it’s just as amusing to feel more at home when I was around them.

I look forward to the day I have enough money to go back to Japan for a vacation and see everyone again.  I have a year of graduate school before I’m finished with school forever, and I’m debating applying for a job in Japan for a few years.  It would be such an experience to teach English at a Japanese high school…at least for a year.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, just visiting would suffice.

In any case, sometimes I look back on all the things I learned while I was in Japan and I feel like I forget them.  I have to be careful with who I am around, because it is so easy to fall back into old habits or ways of thinking that I despise…it reminds me how easy it is to be home and to let life go on around you without stopping it to look at yourself or the world.  Living in America is easy because I’ve lived here for so long!  But just because it’s so easy doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be living and challenging myself.  Someone told me that you should do at least one thing that scares you everyday.

I need to keep Japan alive inside me.  I need to keep adventure alive inside me.  I’m still young, still in love with life, and there are still so many places I want to go and so many people I want to meet.  I’d better get planning, huh?