If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
2024-11-21 permalink
So some time ago was the 10 year anniversary for when I at 19 years old first moved to Japan and away from home. I’m actually not entirely sure about the date, but September 28th feels familiar.
The plan was to attend a language school full-time for one year in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city and part of the Greater Tokyo Area. Then go back home. I was young, deeply enamored with learning languages, and aching to experience the world. Upon arrival I quickly made new friends, and so the adventure had begun. I had free time and the yen was cheap. I went out and experienced the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama basically everyday for months on end. Missing the last train partying in Shibuya, weekend road trips with people I barely knew but whose company meant the world to me, biking among the temples in Kamakura… I was happier than I could have ever expected to be, and happier than I thought I could ever expect to be again.
Of course, this wasn’t real life. Education, career, you have to start thinking about those things eventually, and I needed to decide what to do once my gap year was over. I had originally intended to go back home for college, but I had grown so attached to life in Japan. Many of my international friends were staying to pursue their careers there. I had heard of a program in Hokkaido, the northernmost part of the country, that had peaked my interest. Of course I hated the idea of leaving my life in Yokohama for cold Hokkaido. I researched and researched but found nothing similar anywhere else. Oh well, at least it was the same country. And I’d be able to come back and see my friends on breaks! The idea of spending entire summers back in Yokohama felt like a dream.
Arriving in Sapporo, Hokkaido and meeting my new classmates, I felt out of place. The shared spaces in my dorm were quiet and empty. I remember having snacks I wanted to share, but never getting the chance to give them to anyone. I ended up eating all of them alone in my room when I was hungry.
I remember coming home to my room one day, a few weeks after arriving. I was cold, I was lonely. I was crying and my inner voice was screaming, “I HATE IT HERE”.
Some people in Yokohama I had assumed would be friends for life stopped replying to texts. Sapporo was cold and boring and lacked any of the charm of the far more exciting Tokyo region. My classmates wouldn’t even stay and chat for a little after class. I very vividly remember two Japanese girls talking about me in Japanese in my dorm kitchen as if I wasn’t even there.
Phone calls that had initially consisted of laughing about the latest gossip in Yokohama, turned into crying sessions with my mom, who was on the other side of the world, scared to death because of how depressed I was and begging me to see a doctor.
I just wanted to go home, I was ready to drop out. My professors were passionately against it and managed to convince me to stay. Somehow staying and seeing through what I had started seemed easier. To this day I am still not sure that staying was the right decision.
Was it all that bad for the 4 years and 7 months that I lived in Hokkaido? No. I’m still in touch with some of the friends I ended up making there. I had some of the most memorable laughing fits of my life there. I found a love that lasted for four years. I’m glad that I was able to reach such a high level of proficiency in another language. I got to travel a lot, both internationally and domestically. Hokkaido’s nature is stunningly beautiful. I did of course go back to Tokyo and Yokohama several times, although it was never quite the same.
Having to leave my life in Yokohama behind and moving to Hokkaido is still the most difficult thing I have ever been through. I still feel deeply sad when I think about how brutally unhappy I was for so much of my time there. Sometimes I almost doubt whether that time in my life ever really happened, or if it all just took place in some weird evil shadow dimension.
Recently I have reflected a lot on these study abroad experiences, my own and those recounted by friends as well as strangers online, and what they mean to us. It seems like to a lot of us, they present us with a wonderful sense of life and excitement. As they widen our horizons, teaching us what life can truly offer, a dreamlike quality to these experiences seems not uncommon. And like every dream, it inevitably ends. Sometimes abruptly and painfully so. We build a life, we build relationships that are everything to us, until the reality of money, visa issues, and friends becoming scattered around the world catches up with us. Looking at my own past decisions honestly, attempting to hold on to life in Japan after my gap year was up was an attempt at never having to wake up from that dream.
I lived in Japan for a total of 5 years and 7 months. Today it is a place I have a lot of difficult feelings towards. Both because of the painful memories of the happiness I once experienced in Yokohama being taken from me, and because of how wrong and isolating so much about life in Sapporo was for me. There’s also the disillusionment from working so hard to understand a culture only to realize that there, in all honesty, wasn’t really much there for me to begin with. Over time, the darkness of Japanese society crawled into my brain and planted itself like poison. I left Japan and came back a bitter person. Always terrified of making mistakes, and judgmental of those of others. Perpetually not feeling good enough to the point of questioning my own existence. Unable to shake the habit of constantly holding back my feelings, my thoughts, who I am, until joy, excitement, and delight all suffocate with the rest of it.
It took two years for it all to finally begin to slowly, slowly melt away. It took almost four years to finally go back for a trip in December last year. Just interacting with people, I was acutely reminded of why I had had to get the fuck out of there. I always loved the sense of safety walking by myself at night, and sometimes I still daydream of the endless city lights. But it wasn’t worth it anymore. I don’t know whether I will visit many more times in the future.
Hemingway’s Paris, Sinatra’s New York. Places stay with us forever. Enormous and splendid, they outshine any romantic love we’ve ever known. I loved and missed Yokohama so much I all but lost my mind. I still cherish every single day of my life that I spent there. I loved the streets leading from my house to the train station, the hill to Minato Mirai, the lights, the towers, the ocean, the boats. The smells, the winds, the sounds, the sun. The taiyaki place, the west exit of the main station, the mall where I got those stockings I loved but almost never used because they were so hard to match, the corner by the bridge where we stood forever impatiently waiting for our friends to join us, the restaurant with 400 gram portions of pasta, the ice skating rink, the waffle place, and the bridge by the amusement park with the extra nice view of Landmark Tower. What could possibly truly exceed the feeling of being 19 and running along those streets, not because I was in a hurry, but just because of sheer excitement for life?
I have been finding glimpses of it, though. That dreamlike quality. They’re everywhere if you look. They’re in a neighborhood evening walk. They’re in the nap I took on the carpet, surrounded by pillows and blankets and listening to Past Lives (don’t wake me up) by sapientdream and Slushii on repeat. They’re in those moments in a mundane and ordinary life when one suddenly has an impulse to take out a camera and capture something, because it seems worth remembering.
They really are everywhere.
A fun Sunday in Harajuku in 2015.
From honeydecelis on Pinterest
From japankoofficial on Pinterest
From linviena on Pinterest
From edit_heysmile on Pinterest
From vimiaan on Pinterest
