Goodbye...again.

I may have said this before, but living the expat life is and is not always all it's cracked up to be.

On aggregate, I think the things you gain from the experience and the things that irk balance out, to make living in a foreign land and living in your own country pretty much the same mix of annoyance and happiness. You still have to get up, go to work, do the laundry and pay your bills in other countries. The good things and the bad things are just different.

One of the best things of course, is the chance to meet and make friends with people from all over the world. Of course, living in Japan offers the chance to make Japanese friends, but as well as this, expats tend to flock together. Perhaps particularly gaijin in Japan do, as we are often lumped together here as one cultural entity by Japanese. This common gaijinnness often means that friendships are formed much faster and with greater depth than at "home" and with people you might not have given a chance to in your own countries. It's a kind of emotional survival-based, forced open mindedness, that I think is great.

On the other hand of course, one of the worst things is having to constantly say goodbye to people, as, when you're married to one of the natives, everyone leaves before you do.

And so it was, at the end of July, that we had to say goodbye to the Henderson family. James, Yoko, Hamish and Miki were definitely a positive contribution to Hiroshima society for the few short years they were here, and as usual, I got to know them well enough to really miss them, far too late into their stay. It is one of those relationships though, despite the relatively short period of time we spent together, where you just know we'll be good friends years from now too.

The hardest thing for me being here after 19 years, is finding new friends to fill up the space left by those who leave. I find myself becoming more antisocial in my old age, because it gets so much harder to find people who have the basics in common. Don't get me wrong. I still meet lots of great people here who I really really like, and there are plenty old timers around as well (!!) so I by no means consider myself alone in a strange land. It's just the nature of being a lifer, that most people who come to Japan fresh off the boat nowadays are either at a different stage of life, or a different stage of their cultural journey into Japan, so the void when someone leaves is harder to fill.

James was a JET 20 years ago like me. He came to Japan at the same time as me, and he married a Japanese he met back then. Yoko has been a foreign wife in a strange land, which is not the same as being a foreign husband in a strange land, so she gets that. And their kids, like M, understand what is like being lucky enough to have 2 cultures, while never really being completely normal in either of them. James is Australian but his parents are from Scotland, so there was another connection. So even though we really only got closer in the past year or so, our families just clicked.

I have not met a friendlier, more positive family in quite some time. Most people, however great they are, give in to human nature and enjoy a wee moan about this or that, or let off steam about people who do them disservice now and then. I have been known to utter the occasional cynicism myself. I can honestly say I never heard either of these two say a bad word about anyone. They go out and make the most of their time, working hard and smiling and laughing as they go. They put me to shame.

It is a common occurrence to meet new people you really like. It is a rarer thing to meet people you wish you could be more like. The Hendersons were those kind of people.

The measure of the man is in the size of the crowd which shows up on the shinkansen tracks to see him off. I haven't seen more than 30 people turn up for one family in quite a few years.

Goodbye friends. You will be missed.