Kevin Feeley (Gunma)
What is it about a place that makes us feel at home? I’ve been wrestling with this question ever since I moved away from mine. I relocated to the village of Kuni in the town of Nakanojo about five months ago at the beginning of August when the summer heat was just starting to head out. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I’d never experienced living in a village where the only store closed at six o’clock and the native language of the locals was Japanese, devoid of all “yous guys” and “widdouts.” Suffice to say, I was a bit removed from my home. Even going to college in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts hadn’t really prepared me for my life here, because even the coldest Amherst mornings aren’t terrible if you have centralized heating. But the spatial adjustment hasn’t taken the toll I expected it to, and even though it hasn’t been a terribly long time I feel at home in this place—in this village—something
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I’ve had to reconcile with my intense feelings of homesickness. One of the hardest things about living in Japan has been the number of times I have had to say goodbye to the people I care about. The friends who came to celebrate my birthday two days before departure, my parents at the gate, a buddy visiting from Thailand, and, perhaps most poignantly, my girlfriend coming for New Years. These were all moments that made me take stock of what it means to be home. It was the last one that really made me understand. I’ve been on and off playing with the idea of what a home really is for the past few years, from high school graduation through college, always attempting to make a different space my ‘new home.’ But it wasn’t until my parents sold my childhood home that I really started to wonder on it. It should have been a significant moment—moving from the place I came of age to a mid-renovation
condo—but it ended up being little more than an inconvenient day in my summer. For a while I wondered why the move had meant so little to me—as someone who hates change—before I was reabsorbed into academia and friends and unhealthy amounts of alcohol and pizza. Until I graduated.
