writing meme

[valmora]

I've been lax about posting lately, so here's a meme for good measure. I took it from pargoletta, who got it from shayheyred.

As Pargo comments, it feels a bit narcissistic to do this meme, but:

Pick a paragraph (or any passage between... let's say 200 and 600 words) from anything I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

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[pargoletta.livejournal.com]

America wasn't sure where Japan was taking him, through the subways of Tokyo on the way to his house from Narita.

America fell asleep on his shoulder, woke when Japan touched his hand to indicate that they should get off.

A five-minute walk in an uncomfortable neighborhood, concrete apartments with plants growing at the cracked edges of the pavement, and they stopped at a building that was just as soulless as the pavement. Off-brown brick and small windows with bars shading them for the balconies.

"I usually stay here," Japan said, unlocking the door at the bottom and mounting the stairs up towards the apartments.

"Like instead of in the Imperial Palace?"

"Yes." Japan stopped at the fourth floor, unlocked the door, stepped inside and shed his shoes.

His apartment was two rooms - a bedroom, a kitchen - and two cubbies for the toilet and shower. Not capacious, and America had expected that because he knew his East Asian geography, but smaller than even America had anticipated.

"You're not living in the house I remember," America said. "The one with the paper walls, and the table, and the garden..." He had good memories of that house; the first time he and Japan kissed had been under the blankets next to that table. During the Korean War.

"It was necessary to sell it and move here," Japan murmured. America watched the sad set of his eyes and knew Japan hadn't wanted to move.

[valmora.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. a lot of things went into this, though research wasn't one of them.

As I'm sure you know, this takes place during the Japanese recession of the 1990's, not the recent one. I wanted to express the feeling of "economic struggle" somehow, and I thought contrasting American housing expansiveness with Tokyo crowding would be a good way to do it, or rather, to have Japan feeling nostalgic about having space would do it.

The apartment layout is based on the apartment of a university student I had met; I found out later that there are in fact family apartments not much bigger than the one described here, which is only about 15'x20' if that (your apartment is easily twice the length of hers).

I included the detail about Japan not living in the Imperial Palace because while the Japanese Imperial family do have a strong basis of popular support/affection, they are not the Japanese people. So to have Japan living with them, rather than visiting them, would have been against the populist sentiment I have regarding the Nation-tans as a whole.

There is canon detailing of Japan having a traditional house; I assume it is in Kyoto, the old capital, instead.

The reference to the Korean War is also economic; US military expenditures in Japan during the Korean War were...extremely beneficial to the Japanese economy. For a long time Japan was the US's right arm in Asia, what with "containment wars" and so on.

I didn't feel it at the time, but what I see in this piece now, looking back, is Japan finally asking if he sacrificed too much for his high growth period, and knowing that even if he did, he cannot get back those things which he lost to have that growth.