I think to myself
My front door in Athens
Hi! My name is Rukushito Rinkanake
but friends call me Rinka.
I have been going back and forth between Tokyo
and Athens for the last 9 years. Since, that is, a
DNA test revealed I am not that "purely" Japanese
but have lots of Eastern Med genes, mainly Greek!
This 17% Hellenic genome sequence gave me
the push to visit Athens for the first time back in 2017.
Greece had never really been on my radar,
I was more into NY, London, Paris kind of gal
because of my fashion and design studies.
However, I had experienced the Mykonos
phenomenon two years prior to my first visit to
Athens while on a trip there with my father,
a famous sushi chef. He was commissioned by
a big venture investment company to oversee
the set up of the restaurant Nobou in Mykonos
Hora and work for the next three seasons with
the Kitchen Lab team of the prestigious
Venus Amanda hotel club.
It was wild! So far east, west, south and north
of anything I considered till then, fun,
entertaining, beautiful or tasty.
But I won't go into any details right now.
I'll be back to the Mykonos experience
when I feel ready to filter my still quite
unsettled feelings I harbor way deep in
my soul! After undoing my Greek-Japanese
interception knots and gaining a clear
multicultural vision. I am too sensually
blind to go there yet. My receptors across
the entire spectrum of human activity and
action got blasted by that explosive
encounter with the Mykonos 'island"..
So, I thought for this time to take you cruising,
no gravity, no addresses, no phones,
during my formulating of a wave human
response to what I get back from Athens as a vibe.
Well. I am diving straight in the aura
of the Greek capital.
It is Saturday night May 23 '26 and
I think to myself:
Only in Athens can you enjoy Louis Armstrong
tunes while eating 'gyros' under the moonlight
after a MJ bio film. Forgot to mention that on the
way to this metabar 'souvlatzidiko' on the foot of
the Acropolis, in the taxi, I was blasted with
a serious 'laiko' song by Zafiris Melas
- Adia mou kardia: It is all blurred and fused now:
- ‘It became a habit of mine to hide the
truth inside my empty heart..’
- ‘Not so wonderful this world is to me
but I continue with this sacred night,
I close my eyes and I think I am just
a stranger to myself and all the things
I do is not me but someone else.’.
Later, much later when I went back
to my Greek rental, my Japanese filters
stuffed and saturated by a long buried
legacy inside my mitochondria
now all exposed, burst into this haiku:
- Fog of soft words drifts
Stars float above whispered thoughts
Silent my love sleeps near? -
My greek sleep joint, my home while
living in Athens. I want to believe that
through the years I have managed to
actually live here and not just be a tourist
Well, my place is far from your typical Airbnb
which I hate or any 5 star hotel room with a
view to Acropolis which I adore but I find my
daily exposure to it would defy my mission
which is to discover the greekness inside me not on
a cellular level, done that but deep in my psyche.
So, I basically I asked from a friend of my
father who happens to run among
other enterprises, a real estate organisation
in Greece to secure me a down town,
yet not in any expensive area around
the center of the city, mid-size house
with a yard not necessarily a balcony,
with view or not couldn't care less,
but a small patio or little garden with
pots filled with herbs and cats running
like maniacs around or crashing on my
door mat under a cozy, orange blue tent
for a sleep marathon during heat waves,
well, that's what I was anticipating to be
my initial intense initiation to a
fine greek life tuning.
So my greek home in Sokratous street,
a short walk from Omonoia square, yes!
The famous main meeting spot,
right at the heart of Athens, became
my greek hot spot! The area where all
my fantasies regarding my Greekness
and all my Japanese identity securities
clashed! Yes, it took some time before my
fixed Japanese traits could actually meet
with any greek illusions I had formed by then.
The fascinating part though, evident almost
from week one, since I moved to this house,
was that a third variation started to emerge
concerning myself, my very me, someone that
would appear, be present between my
Japanese self and the most recently acquired
projection of a potential self
that of the Greek kind! Who was that?
Who was I?
Feeling lost, confused or frustrated often
didn't really have the slightest effect on me.
After all, been through puberty, fallen in love
and got dumbed. Not to mention screwed
exams and disappointed friends by that time.
No! This time all these sentiments,
negative all right I won't argue against
that they were pretty heavy but never toxic.
never once felt poisoned or threatened
by these emotions. No! This time
I was fascinated by them, slowly coming
to the realisation that it is not the feelings
per se but why you feel what you feel.
Now, being on my own for the first time,
making decisions only out of commitment
to me made the whole difference in the world!
I felt amused by my fears, not ambushed!
Fears, yes! But my purpose of doing what
I wanted no matter how crazy or flimsy the
premise looked, made me feel excited even
happy at times! Wearing a Japanese mask,
can't be helped since my features are
absolutely there to the very last eye skin
cell and my fluent greek after 2 years watching
every single series on show, old, new all of them,
mingling with mainly native speakers like
Stavros, Nina and Helen but at the end of the day
I would lie on my sofa and wonder what all that
meant and where I would be taken from there.
That alone filled me with unprecedented joy!
It seemed as if I were going from fears to fierce!
I kept saying to myself:
What an adventure to have! And I am all alone!
Not so fast my dearest Rinka!
Not alone, you are not!
There is you, you, you!
And nothing and nobody can stop me!
Mata ne!
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