#japamese

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How To Make Onigiri Japanese Rice Balls

I know that I haven’t been writing here much lately. I could say that I’ve been busy, and truth be told I HAVE been, but that’s mostly a lie when it comes to why I’ve neglected this blog. Actually, I think the honest to god truth is that I’ve just gotten accustomed to my little Japanese life. When I first moved here, everything was new and wild and wonderful; like “WOW the trains play music when the doors close!” or “Can you EVEN BELIEVE that they have vending machines EVERYWHERE??”

It’s been almost two years since I arrived in Japan, if you can believe it, and I’ve increasingly discovered that instead of those moments being magical, they’ve now become mundane. These days I find myself rushing to get on to the train before the music finishes or left feeling disgruntled when the prices at the closest vending machine are slightly higher than the one before.

This is not good, nor is it bad. It simply just is.

It’s a little bit like traveling in an airplane. You feel the rush at take-off, but after reaching a certain altitude, you just move. And life, similar to an airplane, moves fast. Yeah, sometimes there might be a bit of turbulence, but nothing enough to fall out of the sky. Every day I learn a little bit more about culture and language and it keeps me up in the air. The physics of lift and the elasticity of the human brain never cease to amaze me.

My daily life has become a comfortable routine. I’ve traveled all over the world, but still what I find myself wanting to talk about are the minor nuances happening around me, like “so-and-so got a haircut and it’s BAD,” or “omg X and Y started dating,” or “guess what EPS said in class today!” It’s not that I’m unhappy with all this complacency; I just know that no one else wants to hear about it. More backstory is needed to make sense of those stories so they get swept away in the tides of time with the rest of my passive thoughts.

But I still do have moments where I stop to reflect about where I am and how happy I am to be here in this wild and wonderful metropolis. Sometimes I still can’t believe that I actually did it. I moved to Tokyo, Japan. This isn’t a vacation, this is my life. I moved into a tiny little apartment, I set up my bank account and cell phone and internet, I’ve mastered the trains, I’ve gone from illiterate to functional, I am responsible for all of me and everything I do, I’ve created a life for myself and it feels so satisfying.