My relationship with Tokyo, for having been here a sum total of three days, is already very different from Hakodate. In a small, silly way, I own Tokyo in a way that I never owned the city where I spent two months during HIF. While I certainly know the sights of Hakodate better, Tokyo is free and open to me. With the self-taught subway skills, I can go anywhere. There are no expectations for me to be anywhere or to fit into somebody else's system- I'll make my own choices and my own mistakes, and I'll deal with the consequences. (This is not to downplay the huge amounts of help I got from Nick- he was exceedingly generous in letting me crash at his place, show me around a bit, and travel with me to 盛岡 in 岩手県 and 田沢湖. But I've still had a lot of time on my own, and a lot of things I've accomplished on my own.)
I'm suddenly able to apply Japanese in new ways- for the first time, I can imply meanings and readings of unfamiliar compounds with my expanding knowledge of kanji. I can play through a text heavy RPG on DS (ドラゴン・クエスト IX: 星空の守り日と） by reading most of it, looking up what I can and figuring out the rest. I bought a book intended for adults WITH NO PICTURES in it. It could hardly be called a novel by real writing standards, but still, I can read it, and that's a milestone.
Both in Hakodate and Tokyo, I see swarms of お盆 tourists and resent them- I am no longer one of them. Japan is not a week-long joyride of museums and resorts, Japan is years of struggle and pain and misunderstanding and un-acceptance before you should be allowed to have fun with it. They belittle all I've worked for, by furthering the widely-held idea that foreigners have no capacity to master any part of this language or culture.
In certain ways, I already found parts of Tokyo not known to either the gaijin or the natives. I love the Asakusa street markets piled in a maze around Osenji shrine during the day, and its one of the few overwhelmingly touristy areas I can really enjoy. But at night, its transformed; the stalls close and the hoards go to neon-clad shops on other streets. But here in front of Osenji is still brightly lit from all sides, only now the shrines stand free of the sea of bodies, merely the sound of cicadas and one straggler shaking out his lucky stick from the みくじ jar breaking the reverie.
But in the end, the best thing I've come up with to describe my relationship with Japan: Hate sex. There's some aspect of love intermingled oh-so-messily with a frustration, or a resentment,
that manifests itself in vehement urges, not of violence but of wanting so badly to be good at this language that the only thing I can do is thrust myself angrily into it. And I feel like I can't slow down. I want to be ぺらぺら to spite all the natives who believe the blonde American is incapable. I need to earn that respect, (and not the ubiquitous and insincere 上手ですね) by dominating the language, and speaking it severely.
Tomorrow, to Tsukiji to look at fish, to Narita to board a plane, to Spokane to finally catch my breath.
さようなら!
