I had totally forgotten about how I'd set up this blog almost a year ago. Then I was looking at old e-mails trying to clean out my account to accept some big files and voila there it was, sitting almost at the bottom of the bucket that is my hotmail account.

Well, in a way, I suppose not much has changed since I wrote my first blog. I'm still teaching ankle-biters, elementary schoolers and junior high students.

But in another way, the world has changed. Though it really hasn't. only i have. as one very smart man once said, it's not that things change, but rather truths going in or out of favour. But i feel like I've discovered a new truth, a new perception. One that I would have never gained if not for my year and a half teaching up in the mountains of remote Japan. I feel like even though I've been here for over a year, I am only just recently discovering it.

Reading "Lost Japan" by Alex Kerr was really inspiring. His avid curiousity and his understanding of Japanese culture excited a new interest of Japan in me, but at the same time made me feel guilty I hadn't discovered it earlier.

It seems to me that most foreigners living in the land just sort of float at the surface of the culture, usually spewing out biting remarks about one strange cultural quirk after another. And I'll admit to doing more than my fair share of that. After all, it's all fair in culture shock. (the all-encompassing excuse)

I realized how shallow I've been one night while I was at a party of four Japanese girls, Yuki, Junko, Yuko and Yuko. It came from a conversation about boys, of all things. We chatted about which actors we thought was hot... and then one girl said that when she was in the States everyone kept asking her if she had a boyfriend and she felt that they thought it was very strange that she didn't. She thought that in the States it was looked down upon for people not to have a boyfriend.

I told her I felt the same way here in Japan, where even the bus driver in my town asked me if I had a boyfriend.

It was like finally after a year and a half a light bulb popped on in the foggy reaches of my mind. We're not so different after all. Which is essentially very easy to say, but most of the time people hardly mean it -- as with most things they say.

Well, I think that's where I'll end this blog and actually go and do some work today.

ja ne.

-anba