35 degrees
adventures and escapades of a Scorpio gal
Arakawa Riverview
demonchild
frangipani.info
the incredible talking monkey
joa weblog
Kakyou’s World Domination Diary
Keldog
KoKoRo
Laughing ~ Knees
M@Blog
Made in Tokyo
Random Martin
Shut’ Up
super deluxe
Vu Deja?
In my previous update in this vein, I made reference to the “Other Personal Views from Japan” link list on the right hand side of this site as an “expat in Japan” list. This was laziness on my part, an attempt to add a new spin to the “here we go again” nature of these posts. While the list is expat-dominated (that is to say, blogs by foreigners living in Japan), it isn’t exclusively. I appreciate being called on this by Cooool! Japan, in a humorous way.
Thanks Kurt, for including me in your list. It’s a strange feeling to be suddenly bourne down the flow of the digital river. Now I have to actually pick up the shovel and dig, instead of just sitting around and basking in the screen-light!
In some ways I feel much as Cooool! Japan does, though I can’t rank as genetically Japanese. As I was growing up in Tokyo, the friends I hung out with and I… both the international-school-going Japanese and non-Japanese… used to avoid any place that the ex-patriots hung out, simply because we didn’t want to be associated with “those wide-eyed cliquers”. We even distained carrying cameras around in dense places like Shibuya, simply so that we wouldn’t be identified as tourists (illusion is in the mind of the beholder) This of course precluded coming anywhere near places like the American Club or the (then) foreign enclave of Harajuku.
While I appreciate the many websites put out by non-Japanese (and some of them I follow day-to-day) I have no particular desire to add to the hodgepodge of bewilderment with Japan. It is not an “exotic” or “weird” place for me. I am not on hiatus from some other place. It is home. It has formed me. I am much more interested in interpreting the details of this particluar place I love and inhabit, and bringing whatever history I carry into the words that will adorn my site. I just hope I can do the place justice.
I am, thank-goodness, no longer a hoighty-toighty highschool student though, so now I try to just see people as people. Japan is different from when I was a kid. The Japanese have changed, widened their world-view. Including their takes on Japan and non-Japanese, through hopefully proliferating native sites, would also be enlightening. Certainly it would be nice to see less focus on how weird the other side is. As Jeremy recently said in Antipixel http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2003/05/24/daikon_odori.html the other day, “Everything is bizarre” anyway.
So true. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where things weren’t bizarre. I wonder what a place that had nothing bizarre about it would be lke?
Hey, thanks for adding me to your list as well. I’ve found a lot of great sites thanks to you, so it’s nice to be a part of the same list. 🙂
Cheers,
-John
*yikes* Thank you for listing and linking me on your site. Your site is fabulous and informative. I am excited to be a part of it and I look forward to exploring it all!