A very common question I am asked is why I keep visiting Japan. For a while I’ve been thinking of trying to put my thoughts about this into words, and here’s my attempt.
I love travel. There’s something wonderful about leaving your home and going out and seeing the world. Travel helps me forget about work and the day-to-day mundanities of life (like cleaning or mowing the lawn or even driving). It’s even better when it’s international travel, which I believe is an important ‘reset’ in my life, and I’m immensely happy that I’m able and fortunate to be able to do it so often. The two countries I have visited the most are Australia (15 times) and Japan (9 times). Next week, I will go to both again.
I don’t need to explain why I love visiting Australia so much but failing business travelers there’s probably not many people who have visited the same country ten times. Each stay in Japan has been about two weeks, which means after this next visit I’ll have spent 5 months of my life there! Most of this time is in Tokyo (which admittedly is only a tiny part of Japan). What about it pulls me back again and again?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and I thought about it a lot while we were there in January. Yes I love the shopping and the otaku culture (the games, toys, arcades etc) and this is a big part of it. But that’s just ‘things’ and hardly a reason to travel half-way around the world. Surely there’s a greater reason?
I’m well aware that Japanese society has it’s difficulties, and I’m not convinced I’d like to live in Japan. But many aspects of the society I find very appealing. It is very clean – almost unbelievably clean by US standards – and everything seems to just work. You go to the train station and you just know the train will be on time, or that food you buy will be delicious and well-presented, or that when you put money into that vending machine it’s going to work. Trash on streets is a very rare sight, and people are (on the whole) respectful and polite to everyone. While society doesn’t necessarily need all this to function well (I love NYC as well, and it’s the exact opposite!), there’s always a feeling of ‘why can’t everywhere be like this?’ whenever I’m in Japan.
As an example we had (excellent!) food delivered to us by a robot in January. I can’t see that ever happening in the USA…
Tokyo is absolutely stuffed with people. It’s easily the most populous place I’ve ever been, and being part of the crowds in somewhere like Shinjuku station during rush-hour is a humbling experience. In a way, it makes you feel a less important, and less individual. In these moments Tokyo is a giant machine and you’re just one tiny part, moving through a complex system seamlessly getting from A to B. You don’t bother anyone and they don’t bother you, and everything works as it should. Your presence – your role in this machine – is inconsequential, and you know it will work just as fine without you. In January it dawned on me that there’s something very appealing about this.
Maybe I love visiting because while I’m there any responsibilities I have in my ‘normal’ life are gone. Maybe being in Tokyo for me is liberating. I’m not running from my life, but it’s nice to take a break from it once in a while, and I’ve found no place where I can feel so totally removed as Tokyo.
Added to this is the fact that I can’t understand Japanese. The spoken language is a type of music, and the written language an art. While written English is becoming more common (especially in Tokyo), while there I am absolutely bombarded by a language I can’t understand and once again there’s something appealing about this in the sense that it enhances the escape part of the trip. It makes the city more unreal, and given how spectacular and surprising and even dazzling so much of the day-to-day Tokyo experience is, this elevates the stay to another level.
Sure that sign on the wall may be advertising car insurance, but for all I know it’s talking about androids and magic spells. Or in my mind it could be, so maybe on a personal level this heightens the fantastic side of these trips.
I’m a tiny, irrelevant part of an impossibly clean and efficient machine when I’m in Tokyo. I’m surrounded by information that I don’t understand but can interpret as I see fit, and every day there I see or experience something unexpected and astonishing. It feels like an enormous amusement park, and I’m the rider. I can forget adult worries, and just sit back and enjoy myself.
Maybe the appeal is that while in Tokyo I feel I can give up control and just led myself drift. The ultimate vacation: a return to childhood. Perhaps the appeal is that when I visit Japan I can actually (for a while) be the child that’s still inside me.
And speaking of being a child, I’ve traveled to Japan so often now (our first visit was 21 years ago) that the trips are also nostalgic these days. We both remember parts of Tokyo that no longer exist, and some that have changed (Akihabara, for starters). Certain tastes (rice!) and sounds (crows!) overflow with memories. We see things that remind us of our cats (many of which have names based on Japanese memories), or even ourselves when younger. When I first went to Japan I barely knew about Ultraman, and now it’s probably my favourite fandom, and seeing it everywhere in Tokyo always warms my heart as well. Sometimes people ask why I do/see the same things often when I go there and this is the reason: because it makes me happy! (My standard answer to people asking why I go so often is ‘It’s fun!’)
This is an imperfect explanation I know, and perhaps the reason is even I don’t truly understand what calls me back there. Kristin recently said Japan is ‘my third home’ and I think she’s right. Even I can’t perhaps put it into words, maybe the fact is that Japan just keeps calling me back, and I’m eternally grateful that I’m still able to answer the call.
