望郷の念

it has been many a moon, faithful readers. i have been busy with many things - going home, celebrating christmas and new years, enjoying the idleness of home life, and studying for finals. so many things, in fact, that i haven't been able to tend to this little garden of blog. it is a neglected garden, but not for long.

the title of today's post reads boukyou no nen, which i think is beautiful sounding regardless of what it means. don't worry - it doesn't mean something vile. in english it means a feeling of homesickness or nostalgia, according to my dictionary. but what do "homesickness" and "nostalgia" mean, anyway?

well, first of all, "homesickness" is pretty straightforward. sick for home. a painful longing to be home. but the fact that the word "sick" is lurking in that meaning makes "homesick" a pretty negative word. basically, being sick means something's wrong; something's out of the ordinary and needs fixing. so being homesick is not a good thing. got it? if you have questions, i won't answer them, because this part is easy.

next, there's "nostalgia," a word that gets thrown around all the time. whenever i hear it, besides getting a little nostalgic myself, i think it's a pretty good word. sounds nice, at least better than homesick, and it can be used in so many ways. "i'm waxing nostalgic about the good old days" sounds much more poetic and emotive than "i'm homesick. give me mcdonald's" (a common phrase uttered by weary american souls wandering around japan). but when i looked deeper into "nostalgia," i was surprised. apparently the term was coined in 1678 by some guy named johannes, which is already a bad sign because that's a pretty stupid name. anyway, the word is made up of greek: "nostos" means "returning home" and "algos" means "pain and longing." it was used to describe "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again," and originally referred to a serious medical condition. pretty scary, i think. now we'll know better than to say "eating turkey soup makes me nostalgic," unless that turkey soup is something fierce. fearing never again to see my native land? i guess watching "full house" doesn't make me feel that horrible.

now we come to our last word: boukyou no nen. if you look at the three kanji here, we have 望, 郷, and 念. the first one means "desire" and "wish," and it has a nuance of being distant; other words that use this character are telescope and watchtower. the second one means one's "native land," the place one comes from. the last one means "sense," "thought," and "feeling." to conjure up a relatively accurate english translation, it would be something like "the feeling of wishing for one's distant native land" or "the sense of desiring one's hometown, a place that seems far away." personally i like the japanese version better. there's nothing in the word about abnormality or irregularity. it's just an emotion, one that everyone feels. i especially like the fact that the first character 望 (bou) is connected with distance and with things one cannot touch. realizing that the things you miss from your past are getting more distant everyday and more difficult to grasp is kind of sad, but accurate.

the reason i'm writing about these words is that john kamman came to visit me in japan this past week. it was very unexpected and pretty surreal, but it was wonderful. as soon as he got here, we talked just like it was senior year in placid 107. it sounds cheesy, but we hadn't skipped a beat, it seemed. i felt like i was almost reliving college, that the reality of being surrounded by japan and japanese people completely vanished. it was our own little world for five days. and when we talked about st. john's and all of our friends, i started thinking of the snow, of my family, my band, the songs we used to sing, the stupid things we did. i thought of the people i'd hurt, the people we'd forgotten about, how much more i used to laugh. it was a veritable explosion of boukyou memories. and, as we all now know, there's nothing sick about that.