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Back in December, as I sat at my overpriced Ikea genuine pine desk in my over-priced study in really overpriced Denenchofu listening to Christmas carols (no, not that shyt that Starbucks tortures its victims with), I remembered that this was my 13th straight Christmas in Ol' Edo. And counting the Christmases I spent here on trips to visit my wife when we were living separated by the Pacific, and the year I spent in Toyama in '92, it's my 16th or 17th. I asked myself, what the heck am I still doing here?
Well, I suppose I would ask that if I were still in the place I loved without question---Montana. I suppose most everyone asks that question of themselves sooner or later. And I suppose like most, I can't answer that in a simple way.
Do I love Tokyo. Yes, I love, or at least very,very much enjoy living in one of the world's great cities (it ain't really a city, though, it's a prefecture) in one of the world's great civilizations.
However, I am no longer a bedazzled tourist, a naive newcomer, nor am I a Japan-as-ideal-other fantasizer. I gotta live in the real Japan. When I can't, my friends who happen to have been born here and lived here most, if not all, of their lives set me straight, for they know that Japan is not some Zen fantasy-world where everything is perfect or nearly so. They also know, of course, that Japan (seems most everyone thinks of Tokyo as Japan, though it isn't) is not some economically depressed nightmare where everyone has given up hope. Japan---err, Tokyo---is like most other modern, developed countries and major cities.
Back in the day before Twitter killed blogging (Who wants to read and write paragraph long blogs?), I wrote a mostly political blog. Often I was very critical of the policies of the then and now government and the self-muzzled media. Well, that got old. I ain't gonna change anything, and it irritated the Japan-as-the-ideal-other crowd and gave erections of irritation to the wonderfully polite, open and honest 2-chan crowd. I shall try to avoid that this time and do posts of wonderfully non-political blogs. Anyway, to paraphrase our current gov't (which used to be our past government) politics, like history, is a domestic issue. So as a permanent resident and a US citizen who pay taxes twice to provide US security to Japan (and myself) I shall pretend I should have no say in the issue.
Unfortunately for the planet, more to come...
