1st Ever Blog - The answer to "Why Japan?"

The majority of this whole blogworld thing I am getting myself into will most likely be related to Japan in one way or another. Specifically the blogs that will be appearing over the next few weeks as I will be in Japan at the time.

Anyone who knows me knows of my affinity with Japan and it's culture. I'm a white, middle-class Londoner born and bred, yet to an extent I live my life as a Japanese. I am considered more Japanese than many Japanese by my Japanese friends. I am not Japanese.

One question I am asked more than any other (apart from, "Do you wear contacts?") is, "Why Japan?" Here I am to answer this question in the most complete way I can.
I think I need to start this whole thing off with a little background information...

It's 1989, I'm 9 years old. A new girl joins my class at school, her name is Marie she is super-bright and a year younger than everyone else (a big deal at this age), because she is new, young and from a distant country I decide to look after her. I am the oldest and the tallest so it seems only right. Marie is Japanese, she has just moved here from her home in Japan. Before long we become firm friends, we both love art and think the same way ...except when it comes to maths, which I am chronically bad at!

I never really pay much attention to Marie's race, our school is so wonderfully multicultural that we are all blind to such things. I didn't pay attention to it until she went on holiday to visit her family in Japan and came back with lots of gifts for me. Amongst my goodies are two items in particular which capture my imagination. One is a little book of Hello Kitty stickers, the other is a miniature card with a beautiful painting of a crane by a small pond surrounded with water reeds (I have always kept this). Apart from being totally bowled over by Kitty-chan (remember, it's 1989, Sanrio is very new for the UK) I am even more bowled over by the writing that is all over the book and my lovely card. It is incredible, so fluid and far more interesting that our boring alphabet. I have an instant desire to find out more. These aren't words or letters, these are beautifully constructed tiny pictures, each one individual in it's wonder.
Something clicks in my brain, a switch that can never be turned off, I am aware of the beauty of Japan and that I feel a deep connection to it's culture via just a few words that I can't even read.

I doubt Marie truly realised the massive impact those gifts made on me, they were just souveniers after all. However, these items opened up a world and a way of thinking that I could identify with more than any other. A world that understands the way my brain works, like the fact that I can notice and find incredible beauty in 'mundane' things like peeling paint. A world that for all its renowned cliquishness, has accepted me as one of its own and embraced me for my love of it's fine nation. To Marie, I am forever grateful for showing me the door. Domo arigato gozaimasu Marie-chan.


***Note***
I haven't got any scanned pictures of myself and Marie, I think all the photos are in a box in the attic. If they were accessible I would have loved to have posted one here. As I don't, I've added a picture of me age 9, shortly after I 'discovered Japan'. It is the face of a child who knows there is another country out there that could may well be her future. Of course, this is a picture of me, but I see so much of the person I am now in this photo. The excitement, the thirst for more knowledge, it's all there. I can identify with the me in this photo even more than I can with pictures that were taken just one year earlier.