Changes

Once or twice in a lifetime, you meet someone or something who you know - from the very beginning - is going to change everything. It doesn't mean that it will be easy; the most passionate relationships never are. They can be riddled with hate, with insecurity, with confusion and with pain; they can make you happy too easily, can make you cry too easily; they can make small things seem big and the big things shrink down to nothing. But, straight away, these things sink into the middle of you, and there is nothing you can do to stop your insides changing. From that point on - no matter how hard you struggle against it - you are on the road to being somebody different.

Japan has already started seeping through me. I have already hated it with a bone-aching passion; I have sat in sterile train stations - confused and unable to communicate and frustrated by the blankness and formality and efficiency of Japan and its people - and I have cried, and then cried harder because nobody will acknowledge that I'm even upset. I have got on the wrong trains; ordered the wrong food; been to job interviews and sobbed in the reception areas because of the coldness of the teachers and the ugliness of the cities. I have been to supermarkets and wanted to scream: supermarkets where bread comes in three or four slices per loaf, where fresh tuna is kept in the August heat instead of a fridge, where toothpaste doesn't have fluoride and the deodorants don't do anything at all and I can't buy anything because I don't recognise what anything is. I have been burnt by the August sun; I have been bitten by Japanese mozzies, screamed at Japanese cockroaches and nibbled by Japanese river fish. I have said the wrong things and been laughed at ("Give me toilet"); I have swallowed loo water by accident (by peering, in open mouthed curiosity, into the high-tech bowl of a Tokyo toilet and then getting an automatic squirt of bum cleaner), and I have been shouted at by old ladies for forgetting to take my shoes off in cafes. I have been ritually humiliated because nobody will sit next to me on public transport; because small children gape at me and get tugged away by cross parents, and because there is a metre gap around me on even the busiest buses (known, I have now discovered, as The Gaijin Bubble). I have been lonely, frightened, broke, confused and very, very angry: with Japan and with myself for being there out of choice. In short, I have hated it more than I ever thought I could hate a place, and I once spent three entire days in LA.

But this anger has been in short blasts; like any relationship, when the anger and the confusion and the tears are over, I have looked at Japan with clean, tired eyes, and found myself loving it all over again. Because I do: I love Japan. Already - in less than two weeks - I adore it; already it feels like somewhere that could be a home. It is, simply, a mass of the most bizarre, beautiful contradictions I have ever seen in one culture. Opposites are everywhere. The people are quiet, kind, polite; their hobbies are often noisy, frantic, colourful and eccentric. They are simultaneously shy and arrogant; obsessed with sex and prudish; dignified and seedy; cold and immensely warm; efficient and fragile. Everywhere is clean, everything runs on time, everybody has manners; there is no anger, no aggression, no rushing. Underneath the blazing colours and lights and chaos of modern Tokyo is a strange calmness, a strange control; underneath the quietness and traditions of rural Japan is a passion and warmth and depth. 'Love hotels' and nakedness and prostitution and used knickers are everywhere, but if you wear a low cut top or kiss your partner in public people will frown at you. Get something right and they will look at you with suspicion; make a mistake and they will laugh. Speak just one word of Japanese and they will enthusiastically applaud your intelligence and then speak in eloquent English and apologise for their own stupidity.

Life over here makes sense, because it makes no sense at all. It has an air of wholesome tackiness; a crazy, colourful innocence and serenity with no undertones of violence, or desperation, or ferocity that are everywhere in the UK. And maybe it's because I just don't know it well enough yet, and maybe because everything is new and exciting, but already I am in love with this country. I'm crying all the time, and I'm scared most of the time, and I'm in a constant state of confusion, but I'm hooked: already I know that it's one of the most important relationships I am ever going to have. No matter how long it lasts for, Japan is going to make me somebody different.

On Wednesday I start my new job: after a frantic week of interviews, I have managed to secure (what seems to be) a top notch job teaching 'English Through Drama' to little children (pretending to be a tree, and such), and I move to Tokyo tomorrow: at the weekend I will buy a scooter and start exploring my local area.

It isn't going to be easy; I already know that. These kind of relationships never are. I am going to be lonely, I am going to cry, I am going to get angry, I am going to email my mum again and ask her if I can come home (she said no). I am going to call Japan all the names I can get my hands on, and then some new ones that I've learnt especially.

But I'm not going to mean any of them. And, when I've had a little cry and a shout and a sleep - when I've thrown my riceball at a wall and prodded somebody with my newly purchased chopsticks - I'll wake up, blurry and clean and on my own again, and realise that I've fallen in love with Japan all over again.