I am, to put it lightly, overwhelmed. I’ve written so little around here in general lately while I’ve been super focused on other projects. (Namely the Thousand Circles photography end of things…something that I’m working hard behind the scenes to bring together with my work here so it’s all a bit less scattered.) And I’ve just returned from what feels like, quite literally, the trip of a lifetime. A trip I waited for in general since I last left Japan 25 years ago and the trip I waited for specifically since I booked it well over a year ago.
To address the elephant in my room, I also lost my best friend, my Great Dane, Delhi, six days after I left home. I’d left a pretty healthy 10 year old Dane at home and 6 days later she’d taken a serious turn and I cried through saying goodbye to her on Zoom, 1 a.m. Kyoto time, while my mother and Sam and a family friend stood by her and gave her the kisses I couldn’t. It’s not a moment I’m trying to relive this afternoon as I’m writing this, but it’s a bit of a backdrop to the last 2 weeks of my life that I couldn’t leave out.
So suffice to say, I came home to processing a lot. The overwhelming gratitude for having been able to be there. The crash that comes with it being over. The unnerving quiet in my house with Delhi not meandering around and making a general mess of things 24/7. The overwhelm of catching up.
It’s been a lot and I’ve been super focused on cranking out photographs and otherwise catching up at home and recovering from some wicked jet lag…but I can’t not write about this trip and I don’t know what topic to tackle first so I’m tackling this instead. The generalities.
Japan was a huge part of my backstory. I took the language in college, majored in political science with a focus on comparative politics and specifically post-WWII Japan. With the help of an incredible professor I got my foot in the door of a program that let me live and work in the outskirts of the Japanese countryside—a little town in the inaka of Kumamoto prefecture on Kyushu—while I worked on my thesis and quite honestly had an experience that should not have been wasted on the stupid 21-year-old version of myself.
I came home from that trip planning to go back and teach English in between graduating from Columbia and starting law school at Harvard but life happened instead. My grandmother had a stroke and that, together with other things going on at the time, had me take a job in my hometown during that time instead. Then I headed to law school, where I juggled continuing to take the Japanese language on the undergrad campus along with my 1L year for a bit until coming to my senses and realizing that being a 1L at Harvard was probably already a full time job. Then my first big firm, which had a very capable Tokyo office with no need for me and my stilted legal Japanese. Then my second firm. There was a wedding and a mortgage and kids and work and one year after another went by and when it came time to throw together a family trip, “Japan!” was never where we landed. But it was always a part of me. I’ve always felt at home in that place. I love the language and all of the meaning packed into it. I love the crazy wide range of art and art styles. I love the kindness of the people. I love their general way of thinking, from the open-minded acceptance of a range of religions in different parts of their lives to their willingness to dedicate themselves to a single subject of mastery in service of the people around them. I love their practical, powerful philosophies—ideas like ikigai and wabi-sabi and kaizen and kintsugi. I love that they have a phrase, kuchisabishii, which literally means “lonely mouth,” to explain the feeling of wanting to eat for reasons other than hunger. They didn’t just accept the reality of it—they gave it a cute name.
I love that they seem so willing to visit first concepts on a question that they rarely seem burdened by “because it’s always been done that way” in their approach to things. But that they are also perfectly willing to leave well enough alone when something’s been working just fine for the last 1000 years.
I don’t know how to apologize for seeming to make generalizations while knowing in my heart that I am absolutely making generalizations. I’m not saying every person in the country of Japan is like this but I am absolutely saying that these general sentiments exist and permeate every experience I’ve ever had of this place.
And from around May 16th to May 30th this past month, I got to go back. I went on an Adventures by Disney trip organized by my friend Lou and a group of wonderful friends, new and old.
We went from Kyoto to Osaka to Hiroshima to Takayama to Shirakawa-go to Tokyo, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea. It was a lot. I have a lot to write about it all, and a LOT of pictures to share, and I hope you’ll come along with me on the ride.
