Thursday 5 January 2012

住めば、都

"Home is wherever I'm with you....."

For any one Japanese idiom, there are always multiple (slightly unsatisfactory) renderings in English.  

住めば、都  is read "sumeba miyako" phonetically. I'd translate it as any one of the following:
~ home is wherever you live
~ if you live there, it is home
~ home is where you make it

The title of this blog is probably how I have always felt. It certainly is how I feel now.
People often ask me where I come from. In Japan, people often tended to assume I was from anywhere but the U.K. - there are far more Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians than Brits. But once I'd told them I was from "igirisu" (understood by the Japanese as either the U.K., Great Britain, or England, depending on who you ask and how great their knowledge of European geography), that alone usually sufficed. In America, I was asked "England?" more often than specifics. My accent is often bland enough that in Canada and in the U.K., too, people can find it hard to place. 

So where am I from? I tend to give people a longer answer than they bargained for. 
Where do I call home? These days, it is somewhere between central Toronto and Schomberg (further north of the city). A month ago, it was the town of Warwick, England, nestled in the West Midlands and a year ago it was certainly a small farming town in the middle of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan.


Where will it be this time next year? 
I'm pretty excited that I can't answer that question yet. 

No comments:

Post a Comment