Why Japan?

It consists of four main islands and countless smaller accessory islands. It covers 145,925 square miles of land and as of 2012, has an estimated population of 126,659,683. The currency is measured in yen ¥ or en 円, and drives on the left side of the road. What is it?

Japan. To many anime and manga fans in the west, it's a magical place of insanity and wonder.

To many Japanese, anime fans are overgrown man-children who live in their parents basements and shower annually.

Wait, what?

Anime and manga are literally "cartoons and comics."  Outside of "The Big Bang Theory" How many grown men in America are diehard fans of these things? It's just not "cool." (Although Hollywood has been reviving the genre with popular movies like Spiderman 1, 2, 3, The Amazing Spiderman 1, 2, and 3, endless X-men reboots, all of the Avengers and their individual movies and sequels...)

Hmm, maybe another example. Who do you know who still plays Magic: The Gathering? How about Dungeons and Dragons?

I am a fan of Japanese comics and cartoons. They're what got me into Japan as a country, but many people fail to look past this and either obsess over how Japan is the Mecca for shoelace eating insanity, or obsess over obscure shows that lived and died in the 90s. (See: Plastic Little, Gundam Wing, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Weiss Kreuz.)

Note: I love all of those things. But they are not "Japan."

Sailor Moon was my gateway drug to all of these fabulous, WTF shows, and I adore them. But Japan is more than its cartoons.

To me, Japan is tatami mats, kotatsu (which is inferior to the Korean ondol, but I'll cover that later.) Sliding doors, rice paddies, kyudo, ninjas, yukata, samurai, kendo, katana, weird flavors of Pepsi, kimono, geisha, and probably 9000 other things that just...appeal to me on a visceral level.

It's thousands of years of history, and a culture unique to its borders. It's a language that said "fuck making sense, we need three alphabets." It's making the most out of what you have, and being respectful to your superiors. It's honour, a concept that died in America with the civil war.

Japan is not perfect. It's a racist, cramped, technologically outdated place, and it's a country that, should I ever succeed in arriving and making a life for myself, I will never belong to.

But I love it.

First!

Just kidding. Well, not really. It is my first blog post, after all. And I'm here to introduce myself.

Hello everyone, I'm Eimi. I have been a long-time fan of Japan in particular and all of Asia in general, despite the fact that the furthest west I've ever been is California, and the most east I've gotten so far is Scotland. (I can provide pictures, but I was a kid, so story time will have to wait.)

But that's why I'm here. Because I have a dream. From the time I was aware enough to realise that the reason Thundercats and Speed Racer looked different from my usual Saturday morning cartoons was because they were actually Japanese (ie, around age ten or so) I have been in love with Japan. Wholesale.

This gives me nearly twenty years of carrying on a one-sided love affair with an entire culture, and I'm now here to share that love with you, one step at a time.

You see, life in all its infinite glory has decided that I am it's football, and I have been regularly kicked around in ways that made me wonder if I was ever going to leave this city again, much less the country.

Enough about that. It's in the past. As a wise monkey once taught me, "the past can hurt, but...you either run from it, or learn from it." (Source: http://youtu.be/dZfGTL2PY3E)

So with that in mind, I'd like to take you with me on my journey to fulfill a lifelong dream.

Japan.