'It was real; it happened'

[flemmings]

The Kimi Ryokan

My room

Most of all--
One Lucky bar. The photos come from the late 80s but there by god is Patrick, the bane of the Kimi, in the photos section.

I can't remember how one got from the Kimi to One Lucky-- it seemed to involve a path through a field by a canal, which is surely impossible.

Twenty years ago is indeed twenty years ago.

Comments

[summer-queen.livejournal.com]

Fields in Ikebukuro? That seems like a fantasy. Even some of the parks there now are more concrete than green (I think Zoshigaya Cemetery may be the greenest thing left in town). Now I'm going to wonder what Ikebukuro with fields must've been like, and be envious of such a time.

[doire]

I found my Nana's house by following street view. One tree had gone, but it was how I remembered it.

I didn't recognise my own childhood homes though - funny that they should leave less memory. My mother did when I showed her the view, so it is me rather than physical changes. We trust our memories because they're part of us.

I'm mithering; I'll stop before I reach a conclusion I don't like.

[i-am-zan.livejournal.com]

While I don't condone smoking ... many of my friends are smokers. But his line ... "you don't like smoke, lots of fresh air outside" - that is actually kind of cool .. *facepalm*

[unearthly-calm.livejournal.com]

The room looks nice. I don't think I've seen the pleasanter parts of Ikebukuro yet (only the ugly, cement-y, tiled parts), but clearly they exist.
Why was this guy the bane of the Kimi? Did he buttonhole people and bore them to death?
BTW, on a tangent, I was wondering how long it would take for someone to trot out the old chestnut: "You can stay here as long as you want, but you'll never be Japanese"; I heard it less than two weeks after I arrived from an expat who managed to bore me senseless over the course of a group dinner.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It couldn't have been fields, obviously. Within ten minutes walk of the Kimi it couldn't have been open, even. But that's how my memory has it-- 'long view to the Tokyo Expressway' sort of thing.

The woodblock prints of the 20s and earlier will show you what it was like to have fields in Shibuya. It hurts.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Streetview distresses me by having the proportions wrong. My childhood street that I still bike down often enough looks nothing like streetview's presentation. So it's not just childhood memory distorting things.

In Tokyo there's the problem of it not going down *every* little alleyway and by-street. I think I may have found where my old school was, but the street looked unrecognizable, even the landmarks I could identify.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

'Can I take my food with me?' is the next thing.

Oddly I don't remember it being unbearably smoky. Either I was tougher in my early Tokyo days or he'd eased off some. But I was tougher in Tokyo generally-- I'd eat in Denny's without problem but then have to change my clothes when I got home.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It was a nice room, and on the street side so I had light and air, more or less. The rooms on the other side were always dark and dank, being as they faced a wall.

Patrick-- oh argh. Patrick was WASP entitlement from a well-to-do Toronto family, with assumed authority on all things Tokyo and a general grievance against the world. Loud, querulous, monolingual-- the old-time expat kind who, in the words of a friend, 'thought he owned the world even if he couldn't talk to it.' You've probably met his kind, or will. He was just more belligerent and of course, always there in the lounge holding forth about who had insulted him today.

I've found that 'You'll never be Japanese' only bothers those people who think they want to be ie who want the privileges attached to uchi-ness without realizing the restrictions thereof. Same friend, practically bilingual, partly schooled in Japan, once said, 'I was getting sad last night about the fact that I'll never be Japanese, never be really be on the inside-- and then I thought 'Am I mad? Would I *want* to join the Army?' Which, yes. Only twenty years ago it was more like the Marines.

[unearthly-calm.livejournal.com]

Loud, querulous, monolingual - always a fantastic combination :)
Your comment on the "You'll never be Japanese" thing is spot-on...I get why foreigners who have been here for a long time would get a bit tired of having their non-Japanese-ness shoved in their faces, but, yeah, it's not always a bad thing to be an outsider.