On Monday two friends came over to play music at my house. They stayed for a few hours and then we got dinner. I came back and my partners friend was sitting there talking to her.
We rarely have friends come over, not because we don’t like it but apartments in Tokyo are small and most people don’t hang out at their friends purpose.
Some might come over for some speciifc reason, a potluck, a birthday, but it’s not the easiest thing to ask and most people here are so busy and live so spread out it’s hard to catch each other at the same time and it’s more convenient to meet at a station in between to avoid up to an hour on the train.
Maybe in our community some people hang out with each other at home but its usually before or after some event or people who have been friends for a long time or at the most casual to drink together.
Becuase I don’t drink, some people might be confused if I ask them over. I also live with my partner so many people worry it might cause an inconvenience to her or vice versa.
But fuck it honestly. I think I should ask more friends over. It felt really nice having a comminity in our own home. It would have been even nicer if her friend and my friends had met.
It will certainly confuse some Japanese friends: “for what”? “Just to talk and drink tea and listen to music, why do people go for coffee together?” “Oh, ok” they’ll probably say.
I think one reason it’s hard to invite friends over is that we don’t really have a proper closet for our things, or we have a closer but its used more like a storage space for things we hardly use, so our room is full of cloths and books and yarn for her and music equipment for me, all organized but taking up a lot of space.
Our bedroom and our living room are connected. It’s not the smallest place but its hard to manage the space and seperare things. We have one table that serves as a dinner table, a computer work space, and a music studio. We can’t really hide anything so anyone comong over will see everything.
There isn’t much I need to hide but there are certain things we both might not want to answer for, those weird habits you can hide from people who don’t see your private space.
But as I said, fuck it. I always want to create the feeling of a community for people to connect deeper if they want and if our house can do that, we will welcome people over. Hopefully no one brings any friends with smelly feet!
I can’t think of too many people I want to invite over but maybe next time some friends cone to visit, instead of trying to find a place to sit, we can just go to our house like people do in most other places in the world.
The pic above isn’t our house or yesterday, it’s a friends hotel in Xiamen in 2016. We used to hang out there a few times a month
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