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What I'll do in the US

I’m writing today’s entry (but going to upload later) at a café Adagio near by the downtown bus station. This is one of my favorite places, so I come by here almost every weekday after classes, enjoy a coffee and study a little until the time bus leaves. In spite of much snow, I came here today too, for a nice coffee.
When I came here two weeks ago, I met to a performance of a band composed by six elderly musicians playing the guitar, zither, percussion, wood bass and violin. They played country music like pieces with taking vocal parts in turn. They weren’t necessarily virtuoso players, but their performance, rather their ordinariness impressed me particularly in a different way from that other audiences felt.
I wrote it was country music they played before, though, it can’t be defined easily like categories of CD section. Also, they must not have intended to play “country music” at all, which I supposed as an American music. While they enjoy playing that, audiences naturally expect that too. They just shared their music which penetrated in their blood: that is nothing less than their legacy. As well as Buenos Aires where Tango was born, a significant current of fine arts is born in nation of immigrants. Only people starving their identities manage to acquire their original styles. Those styles have a simple and universal power that even impresses a foreigner such as me.
I mortally jealous them, but their music are just for them. In Japan, we don’t have such the way for expression. Because of long peaceful history, Japanese culture didn’t either stand against or confront American cultural influences, instead took in it in the particular way. I always wonder what our culture gained and what we lost in this crucial turning point of history.
This entry is a sort of reflection or another side of my last essay in class in which I mentioned the recent pop culture without conflicts over national identities. In fact, as I’ll approach to something universal in this way as a musician. I will never hesitate to be conscious of differences and even conflicts: only those tensions must finally lead me to find a new style of expression that represents my, our identities. This is my way... as an independent nationalist.