They always give me hope and energize me to do more…

thanks a lot man…

I have tonsillitis and was trying to find a good doctor to treat me/do the surgery to remove them. Before I always relied on my fiancee, who is Japanese, to help me with this. But she’s away on business so I realized I’d have to go to the doctor’s myself. Now that I’ve done 6 months of AJATT, not only could I explain my situation perfectly and understand the doctor’s responses, I could even read and fill out all the forms! When did I learn to do that?? I couldn’t do that 6 months ago. It’s amazing. I can’t wait to see where I’ll be in another 6 months. Now I’m going to watch some more Hayao Miyazaki movies.

本当に、このサイトに、ありがとうございます!

Are you kidding me? If you suck at motivating people, I would honestly be scared to meet someone who’s good at it. I can’t even thank you enough for what you wrote there, it makes sense on so many levels…really. So simple when you hear “it was there all along” but sometimes it takes that external stimulus for you to “wake up” to the truth. ありがとうございます！　＾＿＾

Haha, trust me, I am the queen of laying in bed all day hitting the snooze bar (actually I don’t even bother with the snooze, I just turn the darn thing off), but I will read that document thing when I’m drinking my coffee or eating breakfast (which on weekends is about 2pm >.<)… usually only bits and pieces of it though, just enough to get me going, then I stop.

You sound too motivated to need to do that… I pretty much sink out of bed and attempt to put in my contact lenses, then go back to sleep for a while.

You rock so hard. I’m adding your whole post to my little “motivation/inspiration” document that I usually look at first thing in the morning. ^_^

There’s nothing you really need to “do” as such… because you are already Japanese anyway. You don’t need to be convinced or converted; you just need to realize this basic truth.

Consider this: what are the chances that you, a Westerner, happened to take an interest in Japanese culture? The Japanese language is only 1 out of 7,000 languages on this planet. Japanese people make up 2% of the Earth’s population. And many Westerners resent/have no interest in any culture other than their own. The fact that you took an interest in Japan, out of the blue, and then decided to pursue this interest on such a serious level, speaks VOLUMES. It means that, deep down, there was a part of you that already resonnated with Japanese-ness.

You already felt connected to Japan… which is, of course, 当たり前. Why SHOULDN’T a Japanese person (such as yourself) be interested in Japan? I would even go as far as to say that your being Japanese is much greater than your being American/British/whatev. You speak English by accident, but Japanese was a decision that you made. And what we choose to become is always a million times more meaningful than we were born with.

Don’t look for “evidence” that you’re Japanese; you won’t find it anyway. What we call evidence is really just a bunch of random things that that we talk about after the fact (ex post facto?) to stroke our own nationalistic egos. “I’m Japanese because I look Asian and speak Japanese and I eat food X….” Bullsh!t. You’re Japanese because you identify as such. You speak Japanese and eat noodles with chopsticks as a way of making the outer world believe that you sh!t is serious, lest your fragile ego be hurt. Inner identification is where it all starts.

If you’re still unconvinced, I’d recommend finding some good Japanese friends (even if it’s just people on the internet). Spend ample time with these people – you’ll realize very quickly that you have more in common with them than not. And the things that you don’t have in common yet (such as mannerisms) are because you’re still a Japanese baby. Babies don’t know about manners or how to use chopsticks or how to fill out a 履歴書… but they learn, and so will you.

If you spend enough time with your J-friends to actually become close, you’ll also start to feel like a member of the gang, and before long you’ll have (subconciously) absorbed so many of their mannerisms that everyone will know that you’re Japanese; it won’t even be a 疑問点. New J-people that you meet after that will seem surprised that you can be so 日本人らしい while maintaining a Western appearence, but you’ll know that it’s a done deal.

Then again, you know all along that you were Japanese, right? You know from the start this was your destiny, and that nothing and no one could stop you. You knew from the start that it couldn’t possibly be any other way. Now all you need to do is go out and prove it to the rest of the world. So get out there and start claiming what is rightfully yours.

(I suck at motivating people; I hope that this essay-like mess was at least somewhat coherent… it’s 1am here, to boot, so you’ll have to forgive me. I tried.)