Yep, I'm still a bit stunned—today is my twelfth anniversary of living in this country, so I've been away from Melbourne (my old stomping ground-cum-home town) for well over a decade now.
The plan was originally six months.
When I arrived on July 26th, 2001 the world was, cliché as it might sound, a different place.
It was the year Stanley Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was supposed to take place, but didn't.
That July the World Trade Center attack in New York was still over six weeks away, Junichiro Koizumi had just become prime minister of this country while George W. Bush had been kicking back in office in the U.S. for seven months. John Howard (shudder) had run Australia into the ground for six years already.
Wikipedia had been online for just six months, the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films were released and Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed Amélie. In 2001 Japanese cinema was also on a roll: the great Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) delivered up live-action deep-thinker Avalon, while anime-wise we were blessed with two brilliant films by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress).
the Japanese concept of a ‘mansion’: myriad apartments thrown together in the single building, with each separate flat containing one or two tiny rooms and a more compact bathroom.
I worked for the rather evil Nova franchise teaching English to pay the bigger bills, and did articles on the side for The Daily Yomiuri, an English language off-shoot of right-leaning Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
Twelve years later I'm married and I have a gorgeous daughter in Grade 2 at elementary school—who recently did the bloody brilliant cover art for my latest book.
Some things have stayed the same, like the sticky late-July humidity that assails Tokyo every year, like now, but I'm today not going to whine. It is, after all, part of the charm of the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment