on the eve of a journey

Japan.

“Japan”. Linger on the word a moment. Roll it about your brain like a hard candy on your tongue. Savor it. “Japan”.

Christmas Day 1988. It was a Sunday. Still my favorite day for Christmas to fall on. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve back then. There wasn’t a lot but my Mom and Dad did their best. And my sister and I were always amazed. That Christmas after we got home from church my folks asked my sister and I to check behind a curtain in the family room, said they thought they saw something back there. We raced. The curtain was yanked away. Sega Master System (SMS). Incredible. And that set the course. That planted the seed.

The games I played on the SMS – “Alex Kidd”, “Alien Syndrome”, “Phantasy Star” – were weird. G.I. Joe this was not. These were games with flying cats, kids that played rock-scissor-paper against creepy demons, space curiosities that were as “cute as they were deadly” (a direct quote from the “Fantasy Zone” game manual). I didn’t know it at the time but these games offered an almost undiluted experience with one element of then contemporary Japanese pop culture.

And I loved it.

Pretty soon after that Christmas in 1988 – if not in actual conjunction with the event – I was introduced to Saban Entertainment published cartoons like “Noozles”, “The Little Bits” and, most importantly, “Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics”. More Trojan horses from the Land of the Rising Sun.

It was in junior high when I began making the connection between these artifacts of my childhood and the country they came from. It wasn’t like it is today in America where otaku culture is, if not mainstream, at the very least a well-represented niche. My love of Japanese pop culture at the time wasn’t so much a product of the social isolation I experienced as a means of reinforcing it. This was long before (culturally speaking) the advent of the internet and message boards offered a place for shy basement dwellers to congregate (sort of) and stroke each other’s vanity while exorcising the aggression that would likely get their asses kicked at school so I had no one with whom to share my interests. And even when there were kids around I could talk to they didn’t know about (and weren’t generally interested in hearing about) the obscure videogames and cartoons that so infatuated me.

The films of Hayao Miyazaki came next. “Princess Mononoke”. October 1999 at the Palace in Kansas City. I remember I was in love with this girl at the time and she sat next to me during the movie. Her hand occasionally brushing against mine, electricity shooting up my arm and through the rest of my body every time she did so. I remember this. I remember how crazyoverwhelmingmaddeningexciting it is to be head-over-heels for someone at that age whenever I watch this movie again. And it’s really nice.

She’s married now with a beautiful baby. A family started.

More Studio Ghibli films followed: “The Cat Returns”; “Nausicaa”; Spirited Away”; "Howl’s Moving Castle”. I introduced these to my younger brother and sister and viewing them together became something of an event for us: what we would end up calling “watching a Miyazaki”.

In October 2001 I was rummaging about in a used bookstore that has long since vanished and thought I’d take a chance on a book by Haruki Murakami. I’d never heard of the author but the cover - a sheep in a suit - caught my eye. The book was “Dance, Dance, Dance”. Continuing a trend: I loved it. More Murakami – notably “Norwegian Wood” and “Sputnik Sweetheart” – followed. As well as Tanizaki, Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Endo. What started with videogames and comics was now an insatiable appetite for Japanese literature.

My junior year of college (2005, what a year!) I enrolled in a Japanese culture class at UMKC. Dr. Ebersole. No cakewalk. That year (and that semester especially) was an ordeal that was in some ways made easier by this grey-headed academic sadist grinding his boot heel into me: I completely lost myself in my studies. And it was great to be adding more to my understanding of Japan than just what I’d gleaned from pop culture and the reading of a handful of novels.

And then in August 2007 I moved to South Korea. To a city about as far from Japan as is my hometown of Kansas City from Saint Louis. Why Korea and not Japan? It’s a good question. Part of it was pragmatic: student loans to pay off and Korea seemed (and has thus far proven) to be the more remunerative of the two options. But mercenary considerations are only a part of the picture. (And let me add that my time in Korea has been amazing; I’d not trade this experience for anything.)

I think I may not have yet been able to confront Japan. The Japan that exists within me – the private Japan I’ve been piecing together for more than two decades, a place within my imagination so infused with nostalgia – exists within me and nowhere else. Reconciling this fantasy with the reality of a Japan of people and buildings and waiting on trains and paying too much for a bowl of noodles and culture shock is a tall order. Sometimes we stay in bed not to sleep but to keep dreaming.

“Japan”. A journey twenty years – and almost an entire life – in the making.

So am I ready now?

Does it matter? I leave tomorrow.