Polarity

I received a message from an old hometown friend who is teaching English in another city in Japan. I thought that his analysis of the polarity in experiencing this place was succinct and beautiful.

I'll steal a term from Hokkaido Highway Blues to sum up my feelings on Japan: lovehate. I've never been so simultaneously split in my feelings about, well, anything! While there are certain things you could firmly categorize in the 'love it' column, and others in the 'hate it,' there are equally as many that inspire a throughly mixed, no... pureed, set of emotions; love and hate whipped together in some kind of twisted Venn Diagram. My list of reasons why I dislike Japan is simply a bad photocopy of my list of likes. (The cuteness, the defined roles, the status for foreigners... really, the modes and methdologies of self-identification and interpersonal interaction at a systemic level... meh).