ようこそ！

Welcome to my Japan section. Here I’d created a blog like site to tell you more about this wonderful country, its culture, history and so far my travels and life in the land of the Rising Sun.

Why Japan and when everything started

The question of why already arose at one of the first points in my life of being interested in Japan. A very good friend of mine asked me one year after high school: Why not go to University? And I thought about it, but first of all i thought: what do you even study at Universities…? So i checked the list and the first – so far also only – catching my interest was Japanology. I just took the opportunity and began straight with the study: Fascinated from the first moment, by the language, culture and historical studies, I continued until I found the perfect matching course to this study: East Asian Art History. Under the guidance of an extraordinary great and brilliant Professor (Hans Bjarne Thomsen) I was caught up even more in the whole field of Japanese East Asian Studies. It was especially the latter which led me into a captivating approach of connecting daily life thoughts, political ideologies and academic perspectives. This all ended in a graduation with a finalized thesis about Networks of Resistance in the Woodcut Movement (Netzwerke des Widerstands in der Holzschnittdruck-Bewegung) being published as a book. If you’re interested, here’s the download link to the file, up until now only in German, sorry for that.

To the when-part of the question: I started my studies in 2009 and after three years, in the summer of 2012 I got tired of the studying cycle and felt like quitting university – at least for a break. It was late spring of the same year, when uprising and persistent resistance from the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster echoed through Europe and reached academical levels, even our classrooms. Together with my decision to take a break from the summer on, I followed my call to the pots and was cooking in St.Imier, Switzerland, at the international anarchist gathering as part of our mobile kitchens, together with the European wide network of similar groups. Before I left to cook I was told that “a Japanese speaker, former G8 activist, will hold a workshop at a strange gathering in West Switzerland”. I exactly knew where that was and I not only intended to meet this person, but ended up in a plane towards Japan two months later. Into the Metropolis of Tokyo, into the heart of the glowing resistance. Since then I forged bonds, plans, networks and shared, exchanged and reveled together with fellows and friends.

TO BE CONTINUED…