Going to Japan!

It's what I will be doing next year, studying at Kyoto's Doshisha University from September of 2010 to August of 2011. I am just about at the point of feeling ready to do it.

In case my readership, small as it is, isn't familiar with me, I love learning and speaking Japanese (have been for about 4 years), and being with Japanese people. So it's high time I actually went to Japan!

But it's no secret, I do not have a honeymooner's attitude about going. Sometimes I just feel defeated--by money, by the size of the world, by not being bilingual. You see, many people major in things in which they can get a lot of expertise and then write books and accomplish something. The feeling that I'll always be grasping after my goal--fluency--but never quite reaching it, is disheartening. That and the Japanese people themselves. In a way I don't mind the feelings of otherness that sometimes occur when being with them, I know I'm American and different. But it is kind of sad to think of always just sliding off the filmy surface of the bubble of Japaneseness without ever being allowed inside it.

But then some things seem to show I underestimate myself. Praise from a Japanese teacher, good times with a Japanese friend...glimpses of beautiful vistas in which I do things with my language skill, in which two human beings can truly be friends despite a Pacific Ocean of differences. These moments make me realize how much I "feel God's pleasure" when I speak Japanese.

And anyway, how many people do grasp what they're after in this life? In the words of my 3-year-old cousin: "It's hard to get anything you want. You can never get it all. But you can ask for it at Christmas!" Living shouldn't be about that anyway. It should be about doing the best you can with what you do have to help others in the times and places God's given us to be.

And I'll just say it: going to Japan for a year is the freakin' coolest thing I've ever done in my life and I'm scared stiff and excited out of my mind!! :DDD
いってきまーす！