yes, you may

I'm back at work again today without any classes to teach or projects to work on. It should be relaxing but it continues to irk me that I am just left to drift for weeks at a time like this. At least at this school I have a good enough relationship with the students that I can spend time outside playing with them.

Before I did that though, I went outside to just take a walk around. Hana Town is a very quiet place and this school is one of the more removed ones from anything resembling urban or even suburban life. The school sits on top of a hill surrounded by farms and fields. I walked to the end of the playground and went down a stairway I never descended before. I knew it was there, because I've seen a number of children head towards the corner of the yard and disappear after school, but in all these months I never actually saw it for myself.

The stairs are stone and uneven and they offer yet another view of the farmland that dominates Hana Town. I spent a good ten minutes on that stairway, not climbing or descending but just standing there and looking out at the countryside. I saw a tractor and I could hear the occasional car in the distance, but I couldn't see any other people or machines. Mostly what I saw and heard was pure nature - birds and bugs with the wind rustling the bamboo.

Staring out at the peaceful side of Japan, I was suddenly nostalgic for my own childhood. No, I didn't grow up around farms or forests, but in suburban Westchester there is plenty of nature for children to enjoy. We had a yard with trees on our property. I could walk from my home to two different parks, one with a playground and the other with a river. More than anything, it was quiet throughout the day and night. Our street was not a busy one. The biggest vehicles that came by were the school bus twice a day and the garbage truck twice a week.

I know I tell people "I'm from New York City" and I mean it, but it's somewhat of an exaggeration. I was merely born there and I grew up loving it from afar, living in its humongous shadow in my small village. I know I enjoy city life and I feel like where I live now isn't urban enough to satisfy me, but standing on those stone steps and just being outside in the quiet outdoors, it felt great. It felt really great.

So do I really want what I say I want? Would I be happier living in a house in Osaka or Kobe? Or would I prefer to live in this rural area where my family would have more space to ourselves? Either way I would be choosing to distance myself from one type of environment by selecting to live in the other. What's better to be close to: people or trees? Stores or farms? Trains or tractors?

Ultimately I would have to consider Mako's feelings, as this is not the kind of decision I can make by myself anymore. Mako grew up in a much more urban setting. Her childhood home is just a few hundred feet from a major rail line that has frequent express trains rocketing past every few minutes. I remember I could hear them over our Internet chats quite clearly. Where we live now, we're close to a train but it's not a major artery. The bells of the automatic crossing gate are louder than the trains themselves.

But really, more than actually making a decision here, I'm suddenly caught up with trying to understand my own though process. I know I enjoy myself more - MUCH more - when I spent time in an urban center. Yeah, I hate dealing with crowds and Japanese cities are even noisier than American ones because of everything and everyone here seems to have a loudspeaker or a megaphone to get your attention. This doesn't change the fact that my entire mindset and feeling of self-worth increases when I'm navigating subways and walking down dim alleyways. Put simply, I feel more alive when I'm in a busy city with tall buildings and underground passageways.

Yet there is a significant part of me that just wants to run away from all that. I want to have a house where the neighbors can be seen through the window but not heard through the walls. I want to wake up in the morning to birds rather than clanging bells. I want to fall asleep to the sounds of insects rather than motorcycles. Growing up, I had all that but I kept dreaming of living in New York. Even having spent about ten months staying with my father in Manhattan during my college years, I still can't say with any certainty that it was better than the lifestyle I knew as a child.

With a son on the way I'm forced to ask myself the same questions my parents must have asked themselves in 1976. They both grew up in New York City but they chose to leave. Was it for my sake, because they wanted me to play outside rather than be holed up in an apartment? Or did they simply dream of a suburban life that they themselves never knew but always wanted? It certainly wasn't for convenience's sake, as my father would spend the next twenty years commuting into the city for his career. Is my lifelong desire to live in a city an ironic reversal of their intentions?

Taking it one step further, which country do I really want to raise my son in? Japan offers me more opportunities for steady work and a decent wage, but I fear the cramped living conditions and the "memorization over problem solving" system of education. America would mean more familiar (read: comfortable) surroundings and less cultural ostracization for me, but then Mako would have big hurdles to overcome and I have no idea what kind of job either one of us could find in the United States right now.

Whichever environment we choose for our family, be it Apartment vs House, City vs Suburbs, or even Japan vs US, I suspect we'll always wonder what things could have been like had we chosen differently. If I can keep that in mind, I might have less trouble making the "right" choice and just choose what feels best.

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Labels: family, fuzzy memories, predicting the future, Write or Die