Twenty Years Ago Today

^{Sakura along the imperial canal near Ichigaya / Iidabashi, 1 April 2003.}

I’m not 100% positive on the precise date, but I believe today marks the 20th anniversary of my first ever arrival in Japan. Unbelievable. How.

As a college student, I felt that study abroad might be my one and only chance to visit and experience life in a place like Japan, before returning to the US and settling in to a life in New York or New England. My whole family – aunts, uncles – all live in and around New York City, and at that point in my life I think I had only ever left the Northeast US a handful of times, including if I am remembering correctly only one overseas trip ever yet in my life. My parents had traveled a little bit in their 20s, I knew, backpacking across Europe or spending X months on a volunteer program before returning to New York, having their first child (me) around age 30, settling down and only very rarely ever making such big trips ever again. The idea of traveling more regularly, to more diverse places, was certainly very enticing and exciting for me, but I don’t know that I imagined that I would ever actually do so, let alone live overseas, let alone live in a non-Western, predominantly non-English-speaking place like Japan.

It just seemed so obvious to me at that point in my life that I would finish college, move back to New York, and end up making my life there, as in fact a great many of my high school era friends have, and good for them – absolutely nothing wrong with that, and in fact I envy some considerable aspects of that lifepath as well, as someone who never ending up having that experience of living in Brooklyn or elsewhere in NYC in your 20s or 30s, or of remaining in one city for years and years, developing the kinds of friendships and personal networks, community membership or belonging, familiarity with the city, that one only can over the course of many years.

So, I wanted to take this opportunity and make the most of it – not that London or Sydney or certain other English-speaking / Western destinations couldn’t have been amazing, but if study abroad was going to be the avenue for me to have this once in a lifetime chance to give this a try. Those four short months in 2003 were an absolute blast. The most fun, the most intense exciting, enjoyable, pleasant, adventure – everything was so new, and so exciting. Tokyo, the land of robots and video games and anime and Harajuku fashion, of J-pop and ukiyo-e and kabuki, and all these things.

^{Akihabara at night. August, 2003.}

Of course, my relationship with Tokyo, with Japan, has changed so much since then. I have been fortunate, in ways that 20-year-old me could never imagine, to come back here so many times, to travel and explore and experience so much of Japan. I quickly fell away from being nearly as interested in anime, manga, video games, as I once was – or once expected I would become. And whether I want to blame it on graduate school / academia leading me towards refining into an ever-more-narrow focus in terms of my research interests, or whether to say more broadly this is just how life is, I also quickly came to realize that there are not enough hours in the day, enough days in the year, enough years in a lifetime to ever explore and experience all the things I expected I might one day become familiar with. As an example, not only have I consumed astonishingly little anime, manga, or video games in the last twenty years, but even as my Japanese reading ability has become nearly fluent, and even after now living here for the past 3.5 years, I still have never found or made the time, or gotten into the habit, of reading almost any magazines – it was easy for me to imagine at age 20 that someday I might come to read Casa Brutus or Bijutsu techо̄ every month, or otherwise come to become deeply familiar with Japanese visual culture, fashion, travel, in a certain kind of local knowledge, cultural capital, immersed in the local culture kind of way. And that hasn’t happened. But, I have, actually, in the last year or so since things opened up a bit more after the first years of the pandemic, begun to feel that I have started to actually get to know a community, and certain corners of Tokyo life in that sort of way. Even as I continue to not actually have that many Japanese friends (which is a whole other topic about foreigner life, etc etc), I have in just the last few months started to get to know so many more drag queens, designers and fashion people, stand-up comedians… Though I still do not go to art museums or theatre nearly as regularly as I might have imagined, still know next to nothing about the art gallery scene here, still am very much on the outside of many communities here – e.g. arts, theatre – I feel like developing those networks is within reach in a way it never did before.

But, I suppose I am drifting off topic. This 20 year anniversary just so happens to coincide with me leaving Tokyo after 3.5 years, and moving to Kyoto where I expect to stay another three to five years. So, I’ve got a lot to reflect upon and think about, and it all sort of merges together.

^{Clothes shopping in Harajuku with a friend, M.K. Haven’t been in touch since then, so I’ve added this little bar for privacy. I wonder how she’s doing, where she’s living and what she’s up to these days.}

In any case, what more can I say? It is wonderful to be still in touch, still in communication with a few friends from that time – thanks to the wonders of social media and the internet, but even with that, it really is just such an incredible thing to still be in touch with these folks at all, and so mind-boggling to reconnect with one another and to actually think that it’s been twenty years, when in some respects I feel like we haven’t changed that much as people. I mean, of course we have, but we’re also not total strangers. That said, the majority of people I met at that time, with whom I developed such intense, close friendships over those four months, I have since fallen out of touch with entirely. It would be wonderful to see them again – see how people are doing, learn what direction life has taken for them these past twenty years.

Meanwhile, so many of the places where I spent so much time during study abroad, which might be sites of nostalgia had I not lived here again, have become so familiar – the experiences of that time have been overwritten with so many more times that any particular nostalgia from 2003 has dissipated, or disappeared. Which is, in a sense, rather sad I think, that I no longer remember almost anything about those days, let alone the feeling, the emotion, of shopping in Harajuku or of daily commuting transfers through Ikebukuro. I am grateful to still have photos. But, of course, in another sense it’s also very cool, to think that Ikebukuro, Harajuku, Shibuya, have become so familiar to me. They may have lost a certain magic – and, the demolition of the old Harajuku Station building *fistshake*, and other physical changes to these neighborhoods, has certainly contributed to the loss of an ability to feel nostalgic feelings of being in that same place or seeing those same buildings. But at the same time, possessing a deep familiarity with these neighborhoods, the kind of familiarity that comes from not just visiting but from living here for X years, is a very cool feeling to have.

^{The old main building of Harajuku Station, built 1924, demolished 2020. (Photo, June 2013.) An absolute landmark, a source of great nostalgia for me every time I visited, until it was disappeared.}

One thing that has, for some reason, remained very nostalgic for me, though, is the chimes or tunes that are played at each station of the JR Yamanote line as trains arrive and depart. I am not sure why this in particular, so much more so than anything else, still to this day reminds me of spring/summery feelings, feelings of a youthful time in my life when despite being on study abroad and having classes to attend and homework to do I nevertheless felt so free, and just excitedly soaking it all up, as we explored and experienced Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, and other parts of the city.

I do sorely wish I’d had more confidence, less anxiety or being self-conscious, at that time; this is getting into a whole other topic that I could write at extensive length about, but, I have always found, on all my visits to Japan, that this feels like a very freeing place (for someone of my particular package of white foreign privilege, etc.) to get to try out different fashions, different ways of expressing yourself. And I never really embraced it until a couple of years ago. But, wow, if only I had done so at age 20, while on study abroad. What a thing that could have been. Not that I had the money – that’s always been another major impediment to such things. But, to explore, embrace, leap head-on into, or at the very least try Harajuku fashions at age 20, rather than at age 40… I could have had twenty years of young adult life enjoying such fashions. Oh well.

In any case, every spring & summer in Japan reminds me of those times again. That sunny, airy, free and open feeling that I get from so many anime & live action films about high schoolers. The excitement of going out in the city, to explore new areas or to enjoy cafes and shopping in vibrant places like Harajuku and Shibuya.

The cherry blossoms are I think just past full bloom right now. Spring is here, and as oppressively hot and humid as summer in Japan can be, I eagerly look forward to the reliable warmth – no need for a cardigan or back-up jacket – of the next X months. And to this adventure continuing – this next stage of my relationship with Japan, a place that 20 years ago I thought was a one-time luxury, a once in a lifetime experience. I feel so fortunate, so grateful, and still frankly so amazed, that things have turned out so differently, have turned out the way they have.