ロンドンは好きじゃない。どうしても好きになりたっかたけど、好きになれない。私にとって、５年間日本に住んでた後、ほかの国を日本に比べることが当たり前なことになったんだ。
日本に出かけたときは、いろんな国を見て、暮らして、いい国を見つかたらそこにずっと残る、そのつもりだった。でも日本以外のいい国がない！私はオランダ生まれ、人格は生まれた国が嫌い。ヨーロッパもオランダと似ているから、嫌い。別にぜんぜん違う国のほうがいい、とはい言わないけど。第三世界諸国は。。よくない。そこに引っ越した友達がいる、でもそういう人生がほしくない。私はわがままで太くてオランダ人だから。この間はキューバに行った。キューバを見ることはすごく面白かったけど、そこで暮らすのはごめんだ。市民にとっては酷い国だ。
たぶんこれからは米国に行こうかな、と思ってたんだ。でも行く前でもわかる：米国より日本のほうがいい。今のはただの時間稼ぎだ。いつかは日本に戻る。その時はまた好きになれるだろう？
I woke up this morning well before my alarm clock. I finished some housely chores, something I have been neglecting a bit lately, and then headed out to the station. My backpack already packed; everything I needed for the test at the ready. I arrived at the station and waited over 10 minutes and the train still did not arrive. There were no announcements of bad service but that's just TFL for you. The only thing more unreliable than TFL is Dutch national rail. But I digress. As I was waiting for the train I finally took the time to organize my thoughts on taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for the second time. My gut is telling me not to do it, but I was never able to properly justify it until I stood there at the station, waiting for the train. When it clicked, I just left and went back home.
Don't get me wrong: I still want to go back to Japan some day. That's the only reason I am taking the test: to make getting a job in Japan easier. I do not believe that taking the test will improve my Japanese. The first test did. It made me aware of what to expect and what elements I needed to improve upon. Truthfully: I haven't studied much at all. I have been focusing on lots of things lately. Some of those were more important than the JLPT, most of those weren't. I've been slacking off. I could waste another afternoon taking a test that I know will be borderline, gambling on chance that I will pass this time, or I can just study properly and ace it the next time I try it. I can be better, and I don't need a test to know where I stand.
I'm still listening to my gut.. What a strange thing to do for a person like me..
I don't know why but I suddenly remember, completely out of the blue, very vividly, an encounter I had while cycling Japan last year. I was cycling in the central part of Japan, somewhere in Mie prefecture. I arrived at my planned destination early-afternoon and had already found my hostel: a very nice old Japanese house on top of a hill (they're always on top of hills..). I had my choice of this wonderfully quaint Japanese youth hostel or an expensive touristy business hotel, so obviously I took the hostel. It was a weekday and out of tourist season so there was only one other guest: an Italian woman. I got talking to her and she was a fair bit older than me. She'd lived in Japan for a couple years longer than me and was very used to the country. If I remember correctly she was planning to return to her home country and was doing one last trip across Japan, a bit like me.
Since the town was in the middle of nowhere and there was absolutely nothing else to do, we visited the only nearby tourist site together: two rocks in the sea tied together by a thick rope. There is deep meaning to this but I can't be bothered to write it down here as it is completely irrelevant to the story. After we finished sightseeing we went to one out of exactly two restaurants that were still open and had a very good seafood dinner. As we were eating our meal two (male) foreigners entered the restaurant. You could instantly tell that they were tourists and had not been in Japan for very long. They took the table next to us and started talking to us. It soon became clear that neither could they read the menu nor could they speak to the waiter, which was a bit problematic as in these rural places a lot of people don't speak English. Including the waiter.
We translated some things for them and helped them order drinks. They turned out to be tourists from Israel, staying at the expensive business hotel. They were dressed for action, ready to get drunk and get laid. I guess they must have been really disappointed that the town they were in was so sleepy. That left them only one course of action though, which was to chat up the Italian lady I was having dinner with. Forgive my national stereotyping, but when you think Italian lady, you think party. Too bad for them that this Italian lady had become rather Japanese-ified and was at that moment not very interested in drinking or partying. They kept inviting her (and me, since I was having dinner with her) to drink, go out to their hotel's bar, party etc. She kept politely refusing, saying that she wasn't interested. When we finally finished our meal the Isreali's got more and more desperate, and as we got up to leave they tried to persuade her one last time. She'd had enough though, snapped at them, and then we left. Without the two guys following, fortunately.
Normally I'd perhaps be mildly amused at such an encounter, but at the time I couldn't help but feel that this really showed the difference between foreigners who are living in Japan and foreigners who are visiting Japan. The former are respectful people who are nice to talk to whereas the latter are just obnoxious. This is of course an overgeneralization, and one that I will be on the wrong side of if I ever return to Japan as a tourist. It's interesting to observe nonetheless.
</completely random>
Facebook just suggested a friend to me that I met last year on my cycling trip. I didn't even know he was on Facebook, nor does anyone else in my friends group know him. He doesn't know anybody I know, so how the %@# does Facebook know that I know him? I am really creeped out by this.
It's been half a year now since disaster struck Japan. I remember waking up and seeing it on TV. The videos of the tsunami coming in and sweeping everything away sent shivers down my spine . I have to admit that I gravely underestimated the seriousness of the nuclear crisis that followed afterwards. I thought it was the media blowing things out of proportion, and in a way they were, but the true terror of nuclear accidents lies in the long term. It's not something that just goes away. I shared this article on Facebook a couple of days ago: 63000 Bq/Kg of Radioactive Cesium on rooftop of building in Yokohama.
Without quantifying how serious the situation really is, I was very interested to hear from a Japanese friend who saw the link and asked me to translate it. So I did, and she told me a little about what things are like in the Tokyo area right now. I share and translate it here with her permission:
Here in Japan the news often reports on, for example, how everyone's physical condition is getting worse because of the radioactivity, how everybody is worried about the quality of the food and the drinks. The media talks about it all the time and warns people about it, but then takes no action. Japanese media is just like foreign media: all news programs are idiotic entertainment shows, just like [news programs] abroad, there is no real information. I really want to read the true story but it is nowhere to be found.I left the last sentence untranslated because I find it very hard to translate it and preserve its exact meaning. I leave it here as something that the people who read Japanese will appreciate.Actually, everyone is just continuing their lives as usual. But maybe it only looks like that on the surface..
It is very rare to hear about people [from the Tokyo area] moving to Kyushu and Okinawa, but it does happen. In Fukushima itself it appears quite common that families leave the husband to work in Fukushima while the wife takes the children and moves to a far-away place. Pets and farm animals are just left behind when families move away, that is the sad reality.
I volunteered and went to the disaster area. I saw a foreign woman working very hard to clear the rubble left by the tsunami. It made me really happy to see that.
日本のことで迷惑をかけて申し訳ないけど、、宜しくお願いします。
がんばれ日本！屋上のゴミを食べるなよ！
But it failed! See:
もう忘れちゃったけど、２週間前は日本語能力試験があった。私は２級に参加しましたが、結果は大失敗でした。漢字が多すぎて私の勉強力も中途半端で合格できるチャンスは全然なかった。聞こえる部分だけが簡単すぎて自信がある。まだ結果が出てないけど失敗したことがよくわかった。パソコンを使ったときはいつも辞書があるから本当の難しさがあまり築かない。１２月はまた試験があるから、がんばる！
最近はイギリスに引っ越して仕事が見つかった。失業率が高いと聞いたが、仕事を見つかることがあまり難しくなかった。ソフト開発のほうはどんなときでも仕事がありそうだ。また専従者の生活におぼれこむ事はあまり楽しみにしてないけど。ま、旅のためだ。イギリスもちゃんと経験しなくちゃならないから。今のうちしかない。
今日はこの人のブログを発見した。その人は８年間の間で世界を回って色んなところに住んでた。今も旅を続いている。特別に目にかかったものはこれ：本当に国の人々をわかることが欲しければ、言語を学べればならないことだ。私も大賛成だ。私もそういう生活が欲しい。キノの旅みたいに色んな国を見て色んな場所で住むこと。キノと同じく三日は無理だと思うけど、３ヶ月や６ヶ月の間は出来ると思う。はじめはロンドン。その次はまだ決っていない。雨がないところがいいかも。Until then。
Well, I'm pretty sure I failed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in flying colors. As soon as I saw the first question I realized that I would fail. The amount of kanjis on the test was overwhelming, and I was not at all prepared for it. I've been practicing for fun on a kanji game, which I thought helped me a lot, but it didn't. What I should've done was just take the JLPT workbook and start practicing, writing down kanji as I went along. So many everyday kanji that I learnt already did not appear on the test, and there were a lot of other kanji present that usually only appear in written form, which meant that I had no prior knowledge of them. I guessed, applied reverse psychology and tried to find the answer by treating the questions as an encryption problem. And when all that did not work, I used my psychic powers. Let it be said that if I pass this test, it will not be because of my knowledge of Japanese.
That was the written part of the test. Then came the listening part. I can be brief about the listening: it was quite frankly an insult of my intelligence, and the intelligence of everyone present who had already done the super tough written part. After such an extremely difficult challenge I was prepared for the worst, yet it couldn't have been easier. At least I left the classroom with a slightly positive feeling. And a headache.
When did it turn from a young memory into an old one, I wonder?