And what are you doing all the way over there?

Because what people basically answer when I tell them I'm going to work in Japan is "Japan? But that's quite far away, isn't it?", and there's really not much you can come up with when faced with such a truthful, yet useless comment. What do you answer to such a statement? "Yes, it is" seems a bit silly, because everyone knows that already. "Yeah, well, but you know, nowadays with smartphones and computers it barely seems so..." and then the conversation kind of awkwardly dies out.

So let me explain to all of you how come I've ended up here, and why I wanted to do so in the first place.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved reading, and would read anything and everything that fell in her hands, anytime and anywhere. I'm sure you already know that some books can change your life, even if when you're reading them you don't know it's that kind of book yet, or are too young to realize that books do indeed have such power. There are extraordinary books that never quite leave us, even if we don't read them for years and years, and that leave their mark on us.

Some of these quasi magical books are the series called Der Kreis der Dämmerung in the original German, because for some reason they have apparently never been translated into English (they have even been translated into Japanese, man). It roughly translates to something like The Circle of Twilight, I think. Anyway, these are four fantastic books and between my forever favorites. I used to read them all the time, again and again, and every time I would feel the same expectation and the same excitement. I'd hide them under my mattress so I could keep reading them, and every time I would discover and learn something new.

Now you may wonder, what do these books, however great they are, have to do with your obsession with Japan? Well, they're part of the reason I like Japan at all (same as they are part of the reason I really like History too). The main character is David Candem, the son of a British embassy worker deployed in Japan just at the dawn of the 20th century, and for the first decade of his live, David grows up in the Land of the Rising Sun. Ralf Isau, the writer, takes the chance to drop little bits of information about Japan; language, History, culture... And little by little I became more and more interested in that strange country, so different and fascinating, foreigner and new. That was the seed.

Later, in those troubled teenaged years, came manga and anime, and soap operas and dramas, and movies and songs, singers and actors and all in all a renewed interest for anything Japan, for that odd language with letters like drawings and a way of living so different from my own. With fascination came the need to learn more, and above all the need to see it up close.

That need never left. It laid down and waited its moment, waited until I finished my undergraduate degree, then my graduate degree, waited until its chance finally came up...

To be totally honest, I never really thought the chance would come, because when you want something so much it's like a dream, it seems impossible that it might come true. But it did, and now I'm writing from Japan, even if my brain doesn't quite believe it yet (despite some 20 hours between buses and planes to get used to the idea).

I don't know for how long I'll be staying, or how everything will go, or if at the end it will turn out to be that when dreams come real they lose some of their magic, but right now I'm going to enjoy it to the fullest and live it to its last second.

Big adventures are but a collection of smaller ones, and this is where I'll be telling you every single one I live in Japan.