#leaving.

To my tumblr family.

Moots, followers and lovers, and all of you, thank you. I wanna really thank you all for everything and I appreciate each one of you. Even tho some of y’all don’t interact w me, your likes and follows are very much appreciated by yours truly. Idk how to say this but….I think I’m going to die bcos of my mother’s lectures 😭🙏 pls YALL I WANNA SAY GOODBYE TO EACH ONE OF YOU BEFORE I GO W GOD 😔 tbh the moment I saw my mother’s messages @ the very top of messenger, it really made my heart jump into different gymnastic positions. The feeling of nervousness was knotting in my unbelievably big stomach as my nerves began to give me shocks 😭 IDKKKK THIS IS REALLY SCARY LIKE. Ok so i did the long press tap thing to my mother’s messages and oh my dobby’s juicy arms, SHE IS MAD LIKE REALLY SUPER DUPER MAD. I wanna say my goodbyes to you all, thanks for everything my beautiful and lovely and handsome bbys 😘 BYE THATS ALL MWUAH.

"This song is about people's obsession with Japanese culture that hardly ever extends to the welfare of the people who live there.

I’ve always been very careful of how much Japanese iconography I include in my visuals, because it’s been done over and over again by people who are not Japanese. It didn’t feel right – too basic perhaps – for me to use my culture in my music, but this felt totally unfair. Why can’t I express my culture? This song is about my selfish frustration with people taking and using my culture and not leaving any for me.

At the end of each section I check myself – am I just another Western person making a song about Tokyo?

I felt like people were having casual sex with Tokyo, hence Love Hotel. I saw tourists treating it like Disneyland, getting drunk and being so disruptive. But if we think back to Bad Friend I too was that Western tourist, disrespecting the karaoke workers. This is about me wanting to have ownership over my own culture but also feeling very conflicted due to growing up in the West."

Rina Sawayama on her song Tokyo Love Hotel.

I thought this song was about wanting a person to yourself entirely, but on reading more about it and repeating it several times a day, the lyrics started to make more sense to me. The person that is wanted here is Tokyo. Or one's hometown. And then all of a sudden the song turned into something so personal to me.

I hate change and I hate the people I live with, and so I thought I'd hate my hometown too. I didn't, unfortunately. Turns out I had started to create a growing attachment to this place, as one does with their hometown. And I never really realised this until the day they started urbanizing it. Building parks, invading the beach, putting up outlets of famous restaurant chains, attracting more people. It was the people. I felt this urge to gatekeep it from people who would, as Sawayama put it, 'have casual sex' with it and then leave.

The fact that this place is basically dependent on tourism doesn't help either. My stomach twists when I see people talk about my hometown as if it were theirs, when it was just a one night stand they had with this town. I'm not trying to be pretentious about it, though. I love to travel too and people can definitely fall in love with places. And the tourist influx that my little hometown/state faces is incomparable to the fetishisation of the Japanese people and culture prevalent today. This is just me feeling as if I've been cheated on by my hometown with multiple people.

I feel like the lyric "yeah, your fascination's my world" does a great job of portraying that feeling.

And as much as I have grown to love it, I have also wanted to leave this place for good and wanted to have nothing to do with it. But no footpath will ever feel so safe and welcoming as the one I walked to school on everyday. The tree that rained orange leaves on me while I was walking home on the last day of school. The park that I would sneak out to with my mom after she put my sister to sleep. That short alley through which I would sprint every week to get to my classes. They have, over the past few years, become the very definition of me. I am this town. I flood during the monsoons and turn cold yet warm during the winter. I light up during December and bear the ghost of Christmas within me in January.

"they don't know you like I know you, no they don't"

Everytime they change something about this town, especially to suit the interests of the tourists, it feels as if a part of me has been demolished and rebuilt in a way I don't like. Slowly this place will change, just as I will. And we will be strangers again. It is my only hope.

I have come to the conclusion that I can't be happy while leaving my home. Not entirely. Don't get me wrong though, leaving an abusive household is great. But when you're sad on leaving. It means that you've managed to find comfort and joy and love in the cruelest of places. And that is such a beautiful thing. It means you've fully lived in that place, and have no regrets of your life lived there. So I'm trying not to be all that happy and relieved when I leave this place.