In homage to Japan

I found this essay written by Florianne Marie Jimenez which won the Second Prize in the 2010 Palanca Awards Essay Category.

I used this essay to teach reading non-fiction to my graduating classes, because the essay centers on the home and finding it - a topic fitting for a batch of students who are going to leave their longtime second home.

Apart from this main theme, the essay is set in Japan, where Jimenez realizes all those things she has written in the essay. Amid the horrendous disaster, may all Japanese and victims of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami find home even among strangers.

Here is an excerpt of the essay:

Postcards from Somewhere

by: Florianne Marie L. Jimenez

     "I am in Tokyo." At the time of this writing, I am sitting in a dorm room on a university campus in Tokyo, Japan. You are no doubt sitting in a different place. Or at least, your body is. Your mind is here, with me, on this paper, and when finished, will eventually be somewhere else a. From wherever I (really) am, to wherever you (really) are, I’m trying to write pictures of places: physical, mental, spiritual, and otherwise. Places that I see, but also trying to capture where I am in the cartographies and hierarchies of people’s minds.

     There are infinite ways to find out where you are. Maps mark "You are here", and we believe them. Maps are just simplifications of an impossibly large world, train stations, department stores, airports, countries, cities always being bigger than us. Physically, but also conceptually larger: locations are things that someone else found and created and named and changed long before us. To say "I am in Japan", I am referring to that country of 377,944km2, founded by long-dead people in 660 BC. Someone else called it Japan, and everyone calls it Japan, and to decide to call it "Mexico #2" or "Pencilcase Hills" wouldn’t work, and then you wouldn’t know where I am.

     Locating yourself is a matter of knowing what’s around you, and where or what you are relative to them: in or outside, above or below, between, in the middle, on the fringes. It’s just a game of words and symbols, and convention will always win.

xxx

To Those Who Move

     Stasis is the state we strive for. Once we find a home, we want to stay there and we want to stay the way we are. Unavoidably, we can’t. We have to leave countries because they’re not ours, we have to leave schools once we finish them, we have to leave friends once they go bad. Once we’ve found comfort and happiness in things, leaving them feels like tearing off a limb. Stasis is the state we strive for. Once we find a home, we want to stay there and we want to stay the way we are. Unavoidably, we can’t. We have to leave countries because they’re not ours, we have to leave schools once we finish them, we have to leave friends once they go bad. Once we’ve found comfort and happiness in things, leaving them feels like tearing off a limb.

     Home is where we find ourselves most content with ourselves, with others, with the universe in general. When there’s nothing more that we need to soothe our souls, we want things to stay in the perfect balance that they have. Home is anything: a place, an age, a time, with certain company, no company, a new life, an old one…it depends on who we are and what we need.

     But inevitably, we shift. Time careens along, dragging us with it. Who we are, it changes. What we want now, it’ll be different later. We move homes all the time, and just don’t know it.

     We are home, but not for long. We’ll leave again.

Read the whole literary masterpiece here.