Notes to an erratic self:
"I glance wistfully at the red orb rising
from beneath the now somewhat threadbare snowcapped mountains."

Nope, too contrived. Like the "threadbare snowcapped mountains" - very nice - but the rising sun image - HOW bloody obvious???

"The water in the rice paddies is stagnant.
Crickets skate on its surface,
skillfully avoiding rancid blobs of scum."

Ooooh noooo! Sounds like the prelude to the discovery of a corpse; the poorly worded opening of some Twin Peaks-esque tome of unbridled homicide in inaka. Not exactly the image of rural Japan's incomparable aestival beauty I was hoping to evoke.

"Japan is green."

Wow. Now that's what I call creativity! Astonishing, the Nobel Prize for Literature right there in a sentence! Profound... And I once basked in the self-reflected glory of my allegedly superior command of the English language???

"The day was decidedly kawaii. Hello Kitty gamboled freely through the fields."

Now that's just downright disturbing. I've been in Japan too long.

And I call myself a writer?! My first novel; a searing indictment of human greed and deforestation, personified by the plight of a troupe of anthromorphistic woodland animals evacuated to a national park, and cunningly titled Save the Animals! (with one of those pre-teen exclamation marks that look like an overturned lollipop) was completed in sun- drenched solitude on a lilo in Tenerife at the age of 8 (damn I was such a cliched only child).

Since the dawn of my consumerist awakening, unabashed fantasies of 6-figure advances and film rights have occupied much of my more salubrious reverie. Choice phrases, sublime similes and juicy morsels of metonymic marvel have ever been wont to leave me moist in panting lexical excitement.

Yet ever since the wheels of stomach-fluttering, giddy anticipation hit the chaotic, clammy tarmac of Narita last August, I have been afflicted with a writer's block, about as head banging-against-a-brick-wallingly bewildering as my perplexing penchant for azuki bean mochi, and my pretentious pontifications about my "intellectual novel for the masses", once delivered with such zeal, have vaporised into so much hot air.

Dammit, Japan was supposed to be my moneyspinner. The preconceptive part of my brain (the cerebris bullshitteralis) awash with images of geisha, samurai, neon, temples and sakura, colluded with arithmetical chunks of grey matter and my greedy, spendthrift eyes to plot and scheme myriad glorious ways of spending said advance cheque, by now bulgingly inflated and popping at the seams of my imaginatory bottomless purse.

Surrounded by lush greenery, steeped in Zen oneness and privy to four seasons each imbued with its own, idiosyncratic wonder, how could I fail to find inspiration? Perhaps I'd even have a bit of a Basho (geddit?!) at the old haiku; the way of elegance, with an Anglo-Nippon twist.

Inspiration has been about as forthcoming, however, as a cheery "genki?" from a maniacal, shopping cart-wielding obaasan on a Max Valu-bound mission for gustatory good-sense- defying gastronomical abominations of an invariably dubious fishy derivation. Why dammit, when Western popular culture is swelling with so many celluloid, artistic, literary - even Good Housekeeping glossy spread - odes to Japan?

The same Japa-mania that saw Tom Cruise turning stock, Western perceptions (did Mt. Fuji have to be in every scene?!) of this supposedly great land into a trite Hollywood homage to historically inaccurate poetic licence, now has small-town British office workers' lunchtime gossip scandalously effectuated by mouths filled with supermarket- bought sushi, instead of the usual, soggy cheese and cucumber bap.

My mother now extols the virtues of tofu from her chintzy, BHS Interiors circa 1955- inspired living room that recently acquired some Zen of its own, courtesy of a rather trendy bamboo arrangement apparently "encouraging the flow of chi" (Feng Shui for the over-Fifties, Zen and the art of Home Furnishing Publications). In short, every bugger and his pet koi carp is Far East-a-go-go right now, yet I'm finding Japan about as inspiring as feasting upon foisty natto on a hot summer's day in an enclosed edifice with my halitosis- inflicted Vice Principal.

Dammit, I'm too unmoved even to compose this; a veritable angst-ridden aria to inspirational recession, as I find myself trapped in an infinite spiral of creative stagnation, looking through an ever-decreasing window at a picture of myself looking through a window, through a window, through a window. A comforting thought indeed, as I find myself an aspiring writer, on the threshold of my second year in this crazy land.

Rather than admit that I'm nothing but a big, fat, destined-to-be-an-administrative- assistant-in-Slough failure, and in true Western, tainted-by-a-long-tradition-of-mildly-xenophobic-pop-culture stylee I decided to blame the Other, of course! In this case, the superfluously courteous, pandemically shy, "What the?"-eliciting Japanese (God love 'em!) Other.

Why, in this bastion of individuality, where variety and choice are the buzzwords of the day, whose delectable culinary kaleidoscope vies constantly for my degustation, am I not sprinting to the publishers, my manuscript still steaming like a freshly shat turd in an unheated apartment in December (reassuring to see that I at least still have a meagre grasp of irony)? Because reality never bloody adheres to stereotype, goddammit, and alas, a disappointing, nefarious, seemingly omnipresent homogeneity sadly appears to underscore so much more of life in Japan, than the ethnic make-up of its populace.

Take the language for example, which, I'm sure, has had many a reader of this article wailing "nani?" in despairing confusion. As a native speaker of English, and a student of romance languages, I find only bafflement in the noh facade of simplicity the Japanese language proudly wears.

Yes I can appreciate that it may belie a certain beguiling legacy of Zen minimalism, forming the linguistic backdrop to the admirable and often startling efficiency of this nation's workforce, technological sector (central heating branch aside), and, in light of England's latest lackluster display on the football pitch, sporting prowess. I'll even allow that it bestows a useful, pithy succinctness upon its speaker, facilitating inter-group comprehension and delimiting ambiguity courtesy of its prolific trove of fixed expressions.

As a linguist however - though a scholar who has admittedly abandoned all hope of extracting even a mildly gleeful judder of pleasure from my Japanese studies, trading the latter in instead for the more ignoble gain of CV enhancement - I can't help but ask where the bloody hell's the fun in that?! I mean, what's wrong with personal pronouns for goodness sake?

I happen to have come across some quite charming ones, like um, "I" for example; a dirty pronoun indeed in this society that actively desires the homogeneity and anonymity of group cohesion. And given some of the mutually incomprehensible, dialogues by non- sequitur I have had with some of my colleagues, you'd be forgiven for putting too many faithful eggs into the basket of context.

Moreover, as a writer, I wonder if at times some of the more frustratingly quasi-Orwellian, linguistically deterministic aspects of the Japanese language produce a curious conundrum for the writer working within their narrative walls; particularly those versed in more verbose languages, like internationally renowned Western culture connoisseur and writer approaching rock-star status, Hideki Murakami.

Could the quasi-supernatural absence of presence that pervades much of Murakami's work, represent not a marvelously mysterious unspokenness, but simply a case of lost in translation; a nothingness that could be rendered substance by a more self-consciously expressive language.

English, or French, or Spanish (or Arabic or Chinese, lest I be accused of Orientalism), in all its superfluous, self-satisfying, glorious, egocentric complexity would (admittedly from the perspective of one who has on several occasions, most informedly and intellectually pronounced kanji (bloody ridiculous) and wondered why they can't all speak a civilized language like French?!) appear to lend itself more readily to poetic expression.

After all, isn't it with this that the writer is concerned; with the how as well as the what, with adorning novel ideas and philosophical reflections with bright, bedazzling creative ornament, liberally festooned with fantastic gilded froufrous of metaphor, description and lexical tomfoolery?

If, as linguistic theory from the linguistic determinism of Sapir-Whorf, to the post-structuralism of Barthes and the deconstructionism of Derrida has asserted, that the linguistic is inalienable from the cultural, it is unsurprising to find traces of this homogenous blueprint in various other spheres of Japanese cultural experience. Take fashion; potentially a source of individual creative expression par excellence, and something at which I previously thought the Japanese were rather good, though admittedly even in London, Japanese stylistic tendencies often erred towards the clashing, gaudy, baggy sweat-panted, retro kind of chic.

Find yourself here, however, and it's the teenagers that don't resemble demonic five year-olds, playing dress-up in the dark in a junior Jackson Pollock's crack whore elder sister's wardrobe, and emerging in a blinding technicolour array of sartorial surrealism on acid, who stand out as icons of taste and discernment.

And food: While I'm not at all impartial to the odd bit of maguro sushi, or okonomiyaki with the works, there are times when the palate suffers from a bit of wanderlust. International culinary adventure is difficult to seek out however, when Italian is not Italian, nor Thai Thai, nor Indian Indian, but rather, the tenuous gastronomical muse for a bizarre Japanese fusion cuisine; its characteristic blandness driving those of us hankering after a bit of a sphincter toasting to inject wasabi and snort kimchee for a heat fix (don't try this at home, kids).

If the Japanese language is highly regimented, structured and unerring, so is Japanese leisure time. As personal pronouns are dispensed with, so is the importance of individual pursuit denied within the average weekly schedule (and scheduled it is!). Group activities are privileged, and even hobbies practiced with rigorous zeal, belying the workaholic tendencies of the society at large. The hedonistic pleasures of indolent apathy, not only appear to be absent from the Japanese consciousness, but actively frowned upon when practiced by those of us whom adopt it as a lifestyle choice.

Within my own enforced packed schedule of structured activity, original, creative expression - which so often requires sequestered time alone - appears almost indulgent; thought crime for a lazy bugger with time to think, in the thought vacuum produced by the powerful, centrifugal forces of eikaiwa, taiko practice and various "meet the gaijin" sessions (the latter having turned me into a veritable inaka It-girl, turning up to the opening of an envelope).

Yikes! What a scathing little diatribe I have produced! Is that all Japan has inspired me to create, a railing, bitching rant, reeking more than a little of the foul stench of xenophobia? Not exactly fitting for someone supposedly engaged in the noble business of internationalization, and understandably, a huge disappointment for a self-proclaimed cultural relativist with quasi-Livingstonian pretensions (pretension being the operative word) to "going native" and following the thorny road less traveled to cross-cultural enlightenment. So it turns out my fascination was not with Japan, but with a Western conceptualization of the Far East. Shit! I'm an Orientalist!

To give into proud denial, however, and don the rose-tinted spectacles of cultural superiority, would be a far bitterer cup of vile, bogey-coloured (in my humble, Westernised opinion, of course) maccha to swallow. To blame the Japanese for my stagnant creativity, or worse, to perpetuate the stereotypical visions I came here with, and unmasked as fallacies - is a cop out. It would not be to delve into the essentially esoteric nature of this unfathomable land.

How to give the timelessness of language - xenophobic or otherwise - to Japan, to set it in linguistic stone, when I can't even categorise (as those of us fated with a Western rationale are culturally predisposed to do) my own feelings towards it as love or hate, more a befuddling mutant hybrid of the two extremes. In true Buddhist tradition, the wise man (or woman) is (s)he who admits (s)he knows nothing.

This is no great news for the writer, whose very existential purpose is to put experiences into words. But with regards to cultural reporting in particular, perhaps admitting one knows nothing, is not an altogether pessimistic credo. A recent piece of cinematic cultural commentary, Lost in Translation, won legions of critical acclaim for its protagonists' inability to get to grips with the cultural incongruity Japan offers its Western visitor.

Comfortingly however, for those of us fated to spend extended time in this nation with a culture shock turnover about as astronomical as the annual revenue of the pachinko industry, the film also offers a glimpse into the potential understandings and relationships that can flourish despite a surface-level barrenness of common turf.

Thus, instead of willingly engaging oneself in futile, sadomasochistic attempts at "writing Japan", of producing a lexical mirror image of its concrete reality that is doomed to refraction and distortion; instead of aspiring to build literary bridges between opposing, far-flung cultural precipices, perhaps the writer would do better to appreciate the joys of standing on the edge of the precipice and enjoying an unfettered vantage of the wonders below.

This is not to suggest that the cultural divide is insurmountable, or to buy into neo-racist theories of cultural instead of ethnic atomization, it is simply to argue for the awareness that in reporting on cultural affairs, the writer does possess this vantage point, which is nigh-on impossible to transcend.

Without wishing to descend into the realm of banality, ruled over by that dark Lord of bad writing, the cliche, the truism that through cultural displacement and stripped of the physical and environmental accoutrements that in a large sense define us in more familiar milieux, we learn more about ourselves than about the largely alien setting in which we find ourselves has particular resonance here.

I have learned that as a writer, when it comes to a Japan, my own cultural constraints are my biggest sources of writer's block; that my thought processes, philosophies and musings have been irrevocably coloured by crosscutting discourses of freedom, choice, individualism and spontaneity, each as simultaneously enabling and delimiting - and most significantly as powerful - as eternal Hai, genki desu's, the incommensurable anti-logic of particles and the unfathomable strictness of counting systems.

The writer's crisis may serve as a lesson to all of us, however, grappling as we are, to make sense of our experiences in this country where paradoxes abound: Instead of looking for quick fixes and easy answers, far better to apprehend Japan self-consciously, as someone socialized by certain philosophical and religio-cultural practices, and admit that Japan's green can be seen only through this pair of rose-hued Western eyes.

Well, it's a start.