Sushi and Chips I do most profoundly believe that it is better to search in the maze and risk getting lost than stay and be in a cheeseless situation...i am thus off in search of some damn good cheese!

One year before the earthquake and tsunami struck I left Japan. I’d been teaching English in a remote mountain village. Before leaving I wrote a love letter to the country I had fallen head over heels for. Now it seems all the more poignant.
‘Words seem inadequate when we have communicated mainly through vague interpretation…all I can give you is a list of little things that over time I have come to love and when gone, I will surely miss:
Chopstick cramp, amazing stationary shops, baton men and their elaborate gestures, boys that hold hands and play with each others hair, being tall, cooking on one ring, not knowing what I’m cooking on that one ring, telling kids the Queen is my Mum, raw horse, people that exude elegance, driving in typhoons, one undeniably gorgeous person in every five, getting excited when I go to a supermarket in a city, cherry blossom, indoor BBQs, fires to heat schools, shinkansens, crazy fashion, public transport that runs to the second, the lady who gives me free cake, hot coffee in a can from a vending machine, gesturing the most elaborate things, Japanese beer, teaching over the sound of bugs, feeling ridiculously safe, rice fields, kids unaware they have swearwords on their hats, houses made of corrugated iron and wood, the little lady who looks terrified every time I walk through the door of her café, how hip it is to have a flask, heated toilet seats, wooden schools, playing soccer against 20 7yr old boys, ordering food at a ticket vending machine, seeing a volcano every weekend, bowing, giant penguin suits, trees in schools, igloos, wooden floors, walking through curtains to get to restaurants, bamboo forests, Ueno market, rickshaw men, characters climbing up buildings, TV’s in the street, hanging rice, kimonos, my pimpin’ phone, mail from Granddad stuffed with tea bags, 6yr olds beating me at table tennis, sunken tables, hanging your prayers under a tree, the reaction I get from people when I say I live in Iwaizumi, figuring out the Tokyo subway map, kids clapping when I arrive, the million different ways my name can be said and spelt, ordering by pointing, the sound of birds in the bathrooms, mini shinkansens that bring you sushi, the village chime that sounds like the Hovis adverts, being incapable of speaking English coherently, old ladies with big straw packs full of rice, plastic food displays, people always willing to help, inspirational quotes on T-shirts, Tokyo bay at night, the lack of rain, smiling to survive, making kids speak in a northern English accent, baffling festivals and knowing I survived with a smile on my face.
For all of this I thank you Japan…I’ll be back.’
And so I am. In July I start making a documentary about how my old village is rebuilding. Not the return I had in mind but I have no doubt that the country will be just as startlingly inspiring as it was before….just perhaps in a different way.