Justin is in Washington, just as I've left to work in Denver for 3 months... But his comments make me think about my relationship to this place, one of the two places where I feel I grew up...

I have a picture from the late 70's of me on my dad's shoulders, pulling his afro-like perm and laughing, with the cherry blossoms and the Jefferson memorial behind us. I have so many memories of the 4th of July on the mall, watching vietnam vets sell t-shirts in front of the Lincoln... I rolled easter eggs on the lawn of the White House with my parents, although I was too young to remember it. But I remember asking my parents about the bums on the street, who tied sheets to the subway grates, creating hot-air tents to live under...

I also remember once in the middle of winter when my dad didn't come home until very late, because a plane had crashed into the 14th street bridge. We could hear the sirens all the way from Alexandria.

I always was worried about nuclear annihilation when I was a kid. After moving to Tokyo in 1986, I developed an intense desire to collect all the Led Zeppelin albums, not because I loved them, but because I loved them so much I hoped that I could preserve all of them in the event of WWIII. I thought extensively about creating alternative power sources for my CD player, since batteries would probably be scarce... I was 10 years old.

Later, I ended up going to St. Albans for high school, the boys school on the close of the National Cathedral (Gore actually went there, and his daughters went to NCS)... I had a difficult and emotionally trying time in high school — moshing with skinheads to the special brand of hard core music born in D.C. was one of my main releases. A friend of mine actually got yelled at by the main singer of Fugazi (a local D.C. band at the time) for moshing too hard... ;)

I had so many difficult emotions tied up with that town that I had to get away, and after leaving for college to Carnegie Mellon, I thought I'd never be back there again... Fate has a funny way of turning around and smacking you in the ass though, whenever you start to think you have something figured out. ;)

Yuki and I eventually realized that Denver and Boulder are too slow for us, and the west coast is probably too liberal for me (although I haven't lived there yet...), so we're back in the D.C. area again, and I'm actually going to go to law school, which I never could have imagined even a few years ago... Funny though, as I've gotten older, those emotions have faded with time, and it seems like a new place to me now, full of opportunities.

Sometimes I've felt much like a rubber band, stretched between Tokyo and Washington, when in one place always missing the other... I think a lot of my Nishimachi friends probably feel that way. It's hard belonging to more than one place, and yet at the same time, belonging to neither...