Wednesday 10 July 2013

Oh, To Live In Japan

Shinjuku Post Cards
Japan image from Zazzle


   I had always thought Japan to be a very weird place. Not counting third world countries, of course, it's about as far opposite to Western civilisation as it could be. I'd always thought the language to be insane, I thought the things that were popular were weird, and I thought sushi was gross.
   In the past few years I've changed my views. Sushi is gorgeous, but it's also far from the only thing they eat there. It's not like Italians only eat pizza and the English only eat scones. I also think that some of the popular things over there are kind of cool, but I'm not a fan of Hello Kitty. I've even began to learn a smidgen of the language, and it has to be said, it's not as complicated as it seems. When their words are written phoenetically (ie, not actually in Japanese characters) it's easy to pronounce them once you know which letters are usually silent (hint: U is usually silent). I've even learned how a few specific characters are pronounced (such as ō). Yes, I admit that all of the Japanese I've learned has come from Anime, and I realise I have no use for the words 'protect' 'fight' or 'death god' but I know them. But there are more casual things like suffixes ('san', 'chan', and, less likely to be of use, 'sama' and 'hime'), greetings, politeness (please, thank you, I'm sorry), and numbers. And, to be honest, once you can count from 1 to 10 in Japanese, you can count to 99. For example, '33' is literally three-ten-three (san-jū-san).

   Basically, having given it some thought, I'd be quite happy to live in Japan. Sure, if I was realistically going to move to a foreign country, the most logical choice would be The Netherlands, give that Seeg used to live over there. My preferred choice would be Canada, but if I was really going for somewhere exotic it would be Japan.
   I'm not sure I'd ever actually be able to live there, but I'd be happy to live there for a couple of years at the least. Get a visa then move back to the UK when it expires, that kind of thing. I'd love the food, the scenery would be something else (don't underestimate this: scenery, both urban and rural, does change from country to country. There's only a splotch of water between the UK and NL, but the differing farmland is a huge thing to notice - in England it's all haphazard boundaries, but in NL it's mostly quite square and straight-edged. I don't really like it, it's too uniform, but what can you do?)

   But at the end of the day, I figure this: if I get somewhere with my writing - and I really mean get somewhere - and I have the money to do that kind of thing, then you'd better believe that I'd do it.



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