Shoppu 梅雨の情事

Under my nose. Right under my nose, it was happening.

Five years ago I conjured up a dream to open a real Japanese izakaya bar in the city I lived in. I was a bit ahead of my time. At that point, the locals hardly knew that sushi was Japanese, not Chinese. Or what the hell Ramen might be. Sake, like in some parts of Europe and America, was served as a shot (if anyone was brave enough to order it), and "kimono" was a thin summer cover-up you'd buy at Forever21.

It's 2019 and under the apartment I sublet in the very same city there is a badly misspelled Japanese restaurant named after a commonly sold chocolate bar.

Well, I guess that's what they were going for anyway.

In the shopping mall there are now two stores supposedly selling Japanese products (which are in fact made in China). The highway is lined with manga-styled billboards promoting flights to Tokyo. Every week the list of people I know going, or having already been to Japan seems to grow. My far older colleague, my college friends, the older couple that never seems to go anywhere but the closest and most tourist-trampled islands in Greece, and the girl better suited for long weeks in northern India. Even they booked a short tour in Japan. I sigh. Friends in Japan are happy. It's like the late 80's or early 60's all over again. Japanese culture is becoming inescapable, only this time with a declining economy driving the Yen down to affordability, and the same Olympic enthusiasm that made me toss hopes for a nuclear-energy-free Japan back in 2013 (not that anyone is asking).

I feel my little secret running through my fingers like sand.

When I first moved, I hardly knew anyone who had been to Japan in the last ten years. The local people had very little concept of what Japan was like, or what it had to offer aside from fish. It was early 2014 and with the threat of radiation from Fukushima 3 years prior, foreigners were still somewhat wary to travel to the so-called land of the rising sun. The Nikkei and Japanese Yen were still benefiting the aftershock of the 2008 recession, through which it held relatively strong, making it a pricey and difficult-to-access destination.

But I had already spent my last two summers and winters there.

Japan was my secret with myself. A treasure I kept in the camera in my head. A scrapbook of a million things that couldn't be put into twice as many words (not for lack of trying, obviously).

Yet odd or not, two years prior I couldn't have told you much about Japan. It didn't even make my top 10 destinations to visit list. I couldn't have cared less about the then popular Harajuku trend, or told you much about anime, or why you'd want to drink any beverage with the word "sweat" in it*. In 2012 I decided, on a whim, to study Japanese. Simply because it sounded nice, and I was tired of learning languages that force you to make noises like you're incessantly clearing phlegm. I threw my phlegmless self into learning basic Japanese alone. But learning a language is never just that. If you don't learn the culture that goes with it, you're hopeless. You'll use the wrong words at the wrong time, and even if your accent is perfect, your facial expressions and nuances won't align, you'll send the wrong message or none at all. The more I learned, the more I loved. The more I loved, the more I hated and vice versa, an endless loop. Until it happened, that I became Japanese. I mean, as much as that's possible, but I'll get to that a different time.*

However, my little secret was born to die, (unbeknownst to me at the time).

Sadder than losing my little secret, is the loss of the thing itself. Not the place, or person, but the feeling- as real as anything else. Almost like having an affair and finding out that your lover got into a sudden car accident. They wake up in the hospital room with selective amnesia. They're not confused, they're certain of what they don't know. They have no recollection of you or anything you shared together. All the moments you cherish most -the humid nights hidden away in the dark and the warmth transmitted in the space between their eyelashes and your cheek, are yours alone.

This might be liberating in a sense, now that you're free to talk about them as though you haven't seen them naked. As though you didn't share something no one else can have. As if your bodies didn't make promises you could never keep. But you can also never tell anyone, least of all your lover, the truth. Your secret is forever and what you had is gone.

If you think that escalated quickly, so do I.

But what can I do? That's the gist of the feeling. My Japan is gone. Convenient stores like Lawson and Familymart now have bad translations of ready-to-eat meals. I no longer have to struggle to read in Japanese or ask "what is this thing". The mystery sort of disappeared like a trashy magic trick. In 2018 little kids in rural mountain villages no longer turned their curious dark eyes upwards, asking their grandparents why I look so weird, why my face so "small" (the first time in my life I ever pondered over the size of a face) and I didn't have to remind myself not to be offended by what would be otherwise awkward comments regarding the colour of my skin, the blonde hairs on my arms (while being pet like a capybara), my hip to waist ratio shocking a clothing saleswoman silly, the boutique employee grossly overestimating my pant size and insisting I try 3 sizes up, or even lewd assumptions about my sexual preferences in bed and my apparent desperation regarding the measured frequency of the words 'I love you'. No one cared. Gaijin were everywhere. In suburban shopping malls, sitting and casually having a coffee, or out for a jog on a Sunday in the park. They were found in the most unremarkable backstreets on the outskirts of town, nowhere near any highly rated Tripadvisor sites. It turned out my secret had gone public.

I stood squinting, and staring up at the large placard on the wall above the ticket machines. The lines indicating different trains connection in various colours, a little dizzying in the off-green light of the train station. The sound of the beeping machines scanning rider's cards as they glided in and out of the station. I could make out the announcement indicating the local train heading to some unknown town outside of Tokyo leaving the station "the doors are closing, please step away from the yellow line" beeeeebooooppp chimed afterwards. In the past, I listened to the sound of train announcements when I felt "homesick". Now I stood, tired, like many other passengers, and I followed the lines on the dashboard with squinting eyes, left, and then right, until I found the station I need.

Four years ago I wouldn't have been able to do this. Not because I had eye surgery, but because I wouldn't have understood. I would be standing hopelessly waiting for someone to translate the complicated Chinese-borrowed characters. The signs in nearly every city or suburban train station are now in English. The local bars which once refused foreigners or in general, saw very few of them, now have a line of curious outsiders peaking in, discussing which temple is worth seeing before heading to the next hub. English menus are less-terribly translated, and more commonly found.

Vegetarian and Halal menus debuted outside of areas long-considered to be foreigner-friendly, like Roppongi. Vegatarianism became a trend amongst young Japanese women, if only as a temporary one-night-only diet. No eyebrows were raised as a Chinese family argued (or seemed to argue) as they struggled down the aisle of the Osaka-bound Shinkansen bullet train. Darker skinned tourists walked down the main avenues without receiving a million double-takes. So it wasn't just me. Japan was changing, again.

In fact, nowhere was safe. Gaijin were everywhere, and with them the typhoon of all things user-friendly. Even the traditional Nishiki market began selling grab-and-go items, sellers shouting one-word descriptions of their wares in foreign languages, meters away from the shogun's castle.

He'd be rolling in his grave.

If I told you now that I used to have a secret lover that was fascinated by me almost as much as I was fascinated by him, you would think I'm lying. He's single, and sleeps with everyone. His partners come and go. There's hardly anyone he hasn't tried. So I do my best to lay my memory of him to rest. I might have been very lucky, for all I know. I got the tail-end of a Japan that will never be again. Something that is changing and bound to change beyond my imagination, or yours. Okay, so I'm not the Last Samurai (a totally historically baseless movie, by the way, but fucking good nevertheless), nor commodore Perry or what ever the hell was the name of that Dutch guy that lived on a Japanese island made of trash in the 1700's. I'm not some frontiersman. demo mada, ra-ki dane. I had this secret affair all to myself.

While the Japan, I, and likely thousands if not millions of other people, once knew is gone, I find comfort in old photographs of us together. The picture of me eating odango at a summer festival. How we were stared at so blatantly when we arrived, that I constantly checked to make sure I hadn't tied my yukata wrong, or done anything offensive. The grandmother who's face lit up as she approached me and timidly asked me to come back next year. The children that sat next to me on the stairs and gawked, the silly conversation we had which we all seemed to understand, despite not knowing what was being said. In the years after at a village festival became frequented by tourists. The grandmother disappeared. The laughter and sounds changed. I would no longer be concerned over the hem of my traditional garment, nor my mannerisms. Anything goes.

Locals streamed in and out of the badly-named Japanese joint outside of my apartment as I watched from the 16th floor above. Their lively gossip and smiles indicated they had had a good time, even if the sushi rice wasn't kanpeki perfect, they wouldn't know it anyway. I sigh, resting my chin on my forearm. The smell of a different kind of joint wafting in from a neighbor's balcony- thick and musky, mixed with tobacco, as is common here. Apart from the city sounds below, it's silent. They must be smoking alone.

In a drawing, I guess I would look a little lovelorn and reminiscent. Watching the tops of heads move about below, I remember waiting for the rain to pass while sitting on the engawa, scanning the spread of the city below where the rivers meet. Parapara rain drops fall from the awning above. The city is far, and I can't make out its sounds. On the mountain facing me, roughly 10km as the crow flies but far longer up and down hill by single-speed ma-ma-chari bike, is one of my favourite temples. To the far left, I can easily make out the green square that is the Emperor's palace. The surrounding mountains gaze over at the tiny houses and streets like gamblers crouched on their haunches, eagerly encircling a game of dice. Life patters on. Aoi. In Japanese mountains can be blue instead of green. But then so are traffic signals. I can vaguely hear the wild mountain river rushing and meandering down through the valley behind the few bamboo trees, where the elementary school kids sing every morning,and passed the ancient shrine. Legend has it that drinking its water will grant you a long and youthful life. I can smell the heat ebbing off the leaves of the yuzu trees that I climbed to pick last winter, and the dust lifting off the road hangs heavy in the humid air. The cicadas had fallen silent in the din of the rain, like an orchestra giving way to a lead solo. They begin to play their tune again, one by one, beginning with the tsukitsukiboshi , accurately named for the noises it makes. The bastard woke me up regularly in July.

I inhale deeply.

The wind chime whispers as always, it's telling me where I am.

Where I am, it is the rainy season, and in a few minutes, the sun will brush passed the clouds and the air will be slightly cooler than it was an hour ago, inviting me to clear the plump, cool rain drops off my bicycle seat with my palm and carefully ride down hill and to my next adventure, the tire brakes squeaking as I wiggle passed old ladies, shrines, and superfluous vending machines. The traffic light will sing it's cute "bee-boo" song, as I unclench my hands, lift my feet, tuck my skirt between my legs and let gravity take me through the city towards downtown. Maybe I'll stop at my favourite quasi-Japo-French bakery on the way.

In my body, I'm in a desert, it is July and there won't be rain for another three months at least. My bicycle was stolen two years ago and I'd be scared to ride it in the street anyway. The river wreaks of sewage and hasn't flowed naturally since my dad was a kid. The traffic lights sound like a faint machine gun spray, and I haven't found anything that so much as resembles melon-pan.

A little self-encouraging smile finds its way to the right corner of my lips. daijobu, daijobu. I blink away the blur in front of my pupils. The physical manifestation of what can only be described loosely as homesickness dries patiently at the edge of my lashes and outer corners of my eyes. What is love anyway. How to we get out of it?

I'm old enough to know. We try to remember who we were before. What if we had never met. What if I had never been there. What if I had never decided, on a whim, to learn Japanese, and from there slowly begin to unearth the layers to reveal the only place on earth I'd ever truly considered calling "home", for all it is - good and bad. I'd have never had this secret affair. And would that really be better?

No.

I close the scrapbook in my mind. No. I open it again. There are still empty pages. Turning the page doesn't prevent me from adding new memories, I remind myself.

*A reference to pokari sweat, a popular soda beverage which I personally find nauseating

** I obviously didn't transform into a Japanese person, definitely not externally, but we are subject to what we experience to the extent that we allow ourselves to be.