JoaFruit: A Brief & Almost Certainly Inaccurate History
JoaFruit began in 2002 when Joa, a queer British boy of uncertain occupation (artist? teacher? international disaster?), was living in Yanai, Yamaguchi Prefecture, rechristened MountainMouth because this seemed more exotic and because accuracy has never been this website’s strongest concern.
2002–2003: MountainMouth, Art and J-Boy Trouble
Life consisted of teaching English to Japanese school children, complaining about teaching English to Japanese school children, making art, driving to Hiroshima, buying unnecessary Apple products and attempting to become locally famous without anybody local actually knowing who Joa was.
Hiroshima supplied artists and beautiful oddities including Genmasa, Shige and assorted people wearing extraordinary clothes. Diane, safely back in Britain, remained best friend, confidante and emergency connection to reality.
Then came Kenji: beautiful boy, motorbike, tattoos, skinny dipping, romantic confusion and enough emotional turbulence to power most of western Japan. There were trips to Fukuoka, Pusan, Osaka, Hokkaido and Tokyo; taiko drumming; sentou life; bad hair; good hair; speech contests; accidental outings; drunken weekends and the continued discovery that rural Japan was both unbearably narrow and completely wonderful.
Meanwhile JoaFruit itself began growing tentacles. Readers became Beautiful Abusers, friends acquired weblog identities, and people such as Oliver/TGICB, Philip/ApeonApe and Moody wandered in and made themselves comfortable. What had begun as a weblog became a tiny queer cyber village held together by oversharing, photos, arguments and malicious lies.
2004–2005: Kenken, Beautiful Abuse and Escape
Kenken arrived and rapidly became the central JoaFruit person: boyfriend, accomplice, fellow traveller, emotional homeland and occasional source of total despair. Grandparents and Hannah came to Japan and met him. There were bikes, beaches, camping, arguments, reunions, terrible poverty, fabulous weekends and a great deal of being in love while pretending to be statelessly aloof and mysterious.
Somewhere in this period sits the missing “Fucking Beautiful” post: Joa and Kenken camping beside Lake Hibara, taking and cycling around the lake in a state of chemically assisted wonder. The original has vanished into the net, which is extremely rude, but the memory remains.
JoaFruit became an open community with weblogs, forums, members, music, books, porn, art and increasingly elaborate ideas about what JoaFruit actually was. It probably never entirely knew.
MountainMouth eventually gave way to Britain and then Portugal with Kenken: sunshine, love, strange jobs, financial chaos, photos and the feeling that a beautiful life could be invented simply by behaving as though it already existed.
2005–2006: Korea, WordPress and the New JoaFruit
By September 2005 Joa was teaching in South Korea, living near Incheon and repeatedly escaping into Seoul. JoaFruit restarted in shiny WordPress form with categories, comments and shit loads of photos. The old communal incarnation was finally switched off and placed in a special rose-tinted museum fridge of the mind.
Korean life included English camps, creative drawing classes, photography clubs, apartment troubles, studying Korean, ugly dogs, gay bars, palace trips, fireworks, kimchi ice cream, wisdom teeth, frozen winters and a remarkable amount of coffee.
The Korean cast included Robin, partner in hiking, dancing, skating and general fooling around; Nilesh, photographic and video co-conspirator; J, brief American boyfriend, beautiful dancer and Burger King apologist; and numerous teachers, dates, pupils and Seoul people who drifted through the fruit bowl. Moody, Oliver, Philip and the other Beautiful Abusers remained present through the wires.
Kenken remained everywhere too, even when physically elsewhere. Portugal was remembered, reunions were imagined, love continued in complicated long-distance forms, and eventually came the unhappy announcement: Single Again.
There was also JT LeRoy, mysterious hotmail correspondent, writer, alleged boy, wigged celebrity creation and perfect patron saint of JoaFruit’s obsession with self-fabrication. Joa wrote to JT, received replies, made a “You as JT LeRoy” page and watched the whole identity mystery collapse while remaining much more interested in the fabulousness of the performance than in whether it was technically true.
2006–2007: Back to Japan and Towards Tokyo
In spring 2006 Joa left Korea and returned to Japan for a new job. There was training, life offline, calls from JL, Hiroshima weekends, Osaka trips and the dawning realisation that teaching could not remain the main plot forever.
By Christmas 2006, back at the Rectory and the family cottage in the Peak District, the next plan had appeared: leave teaching, move to Tokyo and attempt to become a designer. If Tokyo rejected him, Britain remained the emergency exit.
This is the natural JoaFruit ending. By 2007 the blog was fizzling out, partly because life was changing and partly because publishing every intimate detail had begun to feel less adorably dangerous and more actually dangerous. Joa was moving from teacher-with-artistic-pretensions towards designer-with-no-money in Tokyo. The old audience scattered. The Beautiful Abusers grew up, disappeared, changed names or continued lurking magnificently.
JoaFruit was never a sensible travel diary. It was a record of trying to manufacture a life in public: queer love, Japan obsession, friendship, art, sex, teaching, escape, self-invention and the occasional ugly dog.
Mostly it was Joa attempting to work out where home was.
MountainMouth? Britain? Portugal? Korea? Tokyo? Kenken?
Probably all of them. Probably none. Yippy :D