It's a magical world

anehan asked how I got interested in Japan for St. Nick's (Happy St. Nick's, if applicable!), and for yesterday, rachelmanija asked about five things I'm happily anticipating upon returning to Japan.

The first question is easy, and for a while I enjoyed telling this story to people, especially Japanese people, because it was so clearly, from their reactions, entirely not what they were expecting.

This story begins in 1999, my freshman year of high school and the golden age of Toonami. My sister and I started watching Outlaw Star on Toonami the same semester that I started watching Revolutionary Girl Utena in my high school's anime club. I talked up Utena to my sister enough that our aunt sent my sister the first two DVDs, which had the first arc of the anime between the two of them, and they arrived on a day when we were making Christmas cookies. That was a good day. From those anime, and then from others that were broadcast relatively quickly after that, I decided that I wanted to study Japanese, a modern language, in college, since up to that point I'd only seriously studied Latin (aside from brief episodes of French and Spanish) in college, and I was soon to add ancient Greek. I did just that in undergrad, which was also when I started to get into manga, after we were required to read a volume of Doraemon in second year because "Nobuta-kun is the walking personification of the adversitive passive." I wound up double majoring in classics and Asian studies, and I made the decision to concentrate on Asian studies for my graduate career because I figured I'd have a better chance of making an impact there than in a field with a millennia-long history. I've done comparative empires (Rome and China) as my second field in history here in grad school, though, so I'm definitely still not completely out of the classics game.

Five things I'm looking forward to about living in Japan again! Well, to be honest, I'm not exactly relishing spending a year very much on my own, and I actually had a stress dream about it last month (which was probably connected to other things going on at the time, in fairness). My social circle in Kansai has eroded by about 95% compared to the first year I lived in Japan, and doing archival research can get pretty lonely. One thing I like about Japan which is also a problem with me living in Japan is that it's very easy to indulge my introvert tendencies; the first time I lived in Japan was also the time I joined online fandom, not coincidentally. I'm stockpiling media and making plans to visit friends and to have friends come visit me, and I know I'll meet new people in Japan, and I'm looking forward to seeing old friends again, and I know once I get there I'll be largely happy, but I of course anticipate being homesick for my friends in the Bay Area, too.

Ahem.

1. Food! I love Japanese food, and there are just so many kinds of it that are difficult to find even in the Bay Area. (I almost just said parfait, but I do miss more Japanese food than just parfait, as awesome as parfait are.)
2. Manga! Imported books are so expensive here that I've been forced to cut back drastically on my buying them (though in fairness I also lack a lot of time to read them). Being actually in Japan tends to fix both problems.
3. Onsen! It's been cold enough here lately--the coldest the Bay Area has ever been in my experience, actually--that I've been missing both Japanese bathtubs, which are generally deep enough for you to soak up to your shoulders, and Japanese onsen. Luckily rachelmanija and I are talking about taking an onsen trip to Kyushu next fall…
4. Sake! I really like sake, but thanks to a convergence of factors I have weird tastes in it, and the sake I like best is either impossible to get here or prohibitively expensive. But neither of these things are true in Japan, luckily.
5. Being back in Kyoto. I know the city pretty well, there's always something interesting happening at temples, and it's close to the rest of Kansai and not prohibitively far from Tokyo, either. It's the best city in Japan, to my mind, and I love it to bits.