One Year Back, and Still No Japan Box

It is not down in any map; true places never are. --Herman Melville

We landed in Japan a year ago, a land both hauntingly familiar and frustratingly strange (oh God, for ATMs that had an English language option...). We were just beginning our grand five week/two continent holiday with a six day tiki tour of Kyoto and Osaka.

I guess the whole fourteen months (twelve in En Zed, one and a half 'overseas' and another two weeks back in En Zed at the end) was a tiki tour, a roundabout way of getting somewhere, even if we usually weren't really sure where we were going, what time zone we were in, or what our local post code/state was at the moment. The destination didn't matter, because we knew it would end up back here in LA someday. It really was a holiday dedicated to going places, focusing on the journey more than the arrival.

And now that we've been back for almost a year, our temporary kiwihood having been revoked on 28 February 2008, what have we discovered?

We miss it. A lot. To the point of almost going to En Zed in April to celebrate ANZAC, except for the fact that a: we have no money, and b: we have no vacation time.

It's the lack of a volcano and cows out the bedroom window, and the fact that there are NO hills in Torrance (maybe we should've moved to El Segundo). It's missing the threat of a chicken chasing me down the street, the convenience of a decent bus system (as long as you were in CBD), and being able to walk into the village for dinner.

It's not the food, since we can get McVitties and Tim-Tams at the British imports shop, or CostPlus. It's not the lack of iced tea (thank God, I'm home) or the limited soda/fizzy drink choices. It's not even the gym, since Boxing Works means more to me than City Kickboxing probably ever could, though that could've changed with time.

It's the people, the family we left behind, the landscape. It's the wildness and the terrifyingly beautiful parts that photos do no justice to. It's that damned tui that nested in the tree next to our flat, and the stray cats who'd always yowl at me until I pet them, and the nice Chinese couple that owned the laundry (as inconvenient as it was). It's the children's bookstore down the road, and the four movie theatres within walking distance. It's Cornwall Park and No Tree Hill and our very own volcano watching over us, day after day. It's Paradise and rough-hewn mountains that sing to my heart somehow, in ways LA and my Hill never did.

Madeleine L'Engle might've said it best in Many Waters:

"I'm very glad the kitchen is all here. But you know what--I'm homesick."

"We probably always will be, a little," Dennys agreed.

Or going back further in memory still, to an old camp song:

We shall return there some lucky day.
Our hearts will guide us, they know the way.
People in cities don't understand
Falling in love with the land.
-Moon on the Meadow

Though I might feel a little better if that Japan Box arrived...