アメリカ

It's funny how my relationship with the University of Michigan and my relationship with the USA has changed by being here. I think they've both changed in similar ways. In some ways, I feel somewhat warmer toward both.
Not out of longing... I feel a great love for UofM, and would certainly miss it if I had time to do so, but I really haven't had it, and there have been so many great new things all the time that I haven't really been homesick at all. Being in America, in a more general sense, I really long for even less. The things that are different so far seem, more often than not, just sort of incidental and insignificant. The streets look different, people act differently... But at first Tokyo was so fascinating I just wanted to observe as much as possible, and now that I'm more used to it, I don't really feel like one place is more comfortable than the other.
I think the real difference is almost more about how I conceive of myself and the US and the University. As we AIKOMers, a small global community, talk about our lives and experiences amongst each other and with the Japanese, I speak about the US a lot. I haven't entirely pinned it down yet, but something about that, reflecting on my own life and observations in order to find truths, however inconsequential, about the country, has changed the way I feel about it. Although I still don't feel that I can speak for the country, and certainly still don't feel that it can speak for me, somehow, seeing it from the outside has led me to feel more aware and more accepting of my status as ~1/300000000th of it, where before I think I felt my self as being more apart from it. Similarly, with my school, though I loved my life there very much, I've always ultimately felt that my time there was mine, and the school and its institutions were more tools, apart myself, which I could use, and which, of course, I had to pay for in return.
It's kind of pleasant, this way. I always liked that I felt that I could choose to have or not have a sort of national personal identity, in that it was my attitude to reject the notion that people can't control something like that if they try. And I think much of the reason I never have really accepted an "American" identity is that I've felt myself a citizen of world and of humanity as a whole, far, far before being a citizen of the USA. I still definitely feel this way - my obligation to any one country is still, for me, basically zero, and my obligation to humankind is all-encompassing. But, besides this new feeling of myself as one part of the USA, I also now kind of feel that the USA is part of me. After all, I have to talk about the country (and my school) to talk about myself and my experiences, and vice versa. So, I still feel myself a citizen of the world, and I still do feel that I am not limited by my place of birth more than I choose to be - if anything, the feelings I'm developing toward Tokyo lead me to believe that things like "home" are something I get to construct and have a great say in myself - but, I also do now feel some kind of identity of origin and history and established, realized (as opposed to potential, or unrealized) connection that I didn't feel before. It is nice.