Hello, Japan. Goodbye, My Japan.

A eulogy for a fantasy

Next month, I am returning to Japan for the first time in eight years. During the entire planning phase for this trip, I have been deliberately not having feelings about this. When I have feelings, I can’t plan things. Now that the planning is complete, I am allowing myself to have feelings about this.

I spent the five months between September 2015 and January 2016 in Japan. For four months, I was an exchange student at a university. For two weeks, I was a world-weary traveller. I visited many Japanese cities and towns: Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Tsukuba, Hitachinaka, Tsuchiura, Ushiku, Nikkou, Nara, Oarai, to offer an exhaustive list in order of population. I lived in a city called Mito, in the prefecture of Ibaraki, on the east coast of the country. I never thought of it as the east coast while I was there, because the nearest ocean was the Pacific, which in my internal compass has always signified west.

My sense of geography while in Japan was subject to many such confusions. Day after day, week after week, I would travel to places whose relation to each other was a total mystery. It took me several months to reconcile the two distinct routes that both led to the park near my dorm. I was always mixed up and jumbled about, stumbling into old areas from new directions. Upon reflection, I can’t make any sense of this fact. I had access to the internet, and therefore Google Maps. I could have, at any time, figured any of this out. But I didn’t.

It wasn’t until I returned home that Japan became a map. It wasn’t until I sat at my computer, jetlagged and lonely in the middle of the night, and cruised through Google Street View, that Japan took on a cartographic form. It’s the difference between living your life and writing a book about your life. You don’t live your life in the form of words; it only becomes that later, when you reflect on it. We don’t live our lives on maps. We live them on Earth Planet.

I’ve written extensively about My Japan, the Japan I formed during the years following my “trip,” when, like some sort of Primeval Man, I did nothing but compare my present era to some long-lost Golden Age. My Japan was a combination of my fantastical expectations and my utterly mundane experiences. It was an attempt to reconcile these fantastical expectations with their utterly mundane counterparts.

I lived in Japan: meaning I ate, drank, breathed, and slept in Japan. I walked down the most boring streets you could ever imagine. I sat at tables and had conversations that no one will ever remember. I browsed websites on my computer.

All that has nothing to do with My Japan. My Japan was born the day I first saw a computer-generated anime man roll around in a garbage can. My Japan rolled around just like that man, through novels and songs and anime and video games, while little crumbs of Japan stuck to it like a Katamari. It expanded. It took on non-Euclidean dimensions. Then, it deflated. Then, it expanded again. It expanded until it crushed me, until I couldn’t breathe. Then, it deflated again.

When I lived in Japan, all I thought about was My Japan. I wondered about whether the Japan I was living in measured up to My Japan. I wondered about whether the man I was measured up to the man I had to be to make My Japan a reality. The answer to both of these wonderings was: no. I lived this disappointment.

I’m no longer twenty years old. I’m no longer even twenty-one years old. Heck, I’m no longer twenty-two years old. In fact, I am not even twenty-three years old anymore. Nor twenty-four. Not twenty-five either. No, at this point, I am no longer even twenty-six years old.

Believe it or not, I am no longer twenty-seven years old.

I have a normal life now. I’m a normal person. I’m a regular guy. I’m just like anyone else. I don’t have to cling to a fantasy realm. I don’t have to aspire to a fantasy life. I have my own life. I no longer worry about who I’m going to become; I’ve become someone. I no longer feel the need to become the man I one day felt I needed to become. I no longer need My Japan.

When I got home from Japan, I was absolutely certain that I would be back within a few years. It was the only certainty in what had become a remarkably hazy future. Months passed, and I was no closer to returning to Japan. Months passed again, and the thought gradually occurred to me: flying across the Pacific Ocean costs money. I didn’t have any money. I had spent all my money in Japan. I had spent all my money living a life where I didn’t have to think about money. I had eaten at restaurants; bought CDs, books, manga, and video games; ridden trains; stayed at hotels; visited tourist attractions and bought the expensive sodas in nearby vending machines.

It struck me that I had absolutely no idea what it was like to live in Japan, because I hadn’t lived there. I had only visited. I had visited, and lived a visitor’s life.

When I thought of returning to Japan, it wasn’t Japan I was thinking of returning to. It was My Japan. When I thought of returning to Japan, I was thinking about travelling back in time. I was thinking of going back to exact places in exact moments with the exact people who I had been with before. I was thinking of doing all that, and having it turn out somehow differently.

All those people left at the same time I did. And when they left — when we left — all that world disappeared.

This is why when I would read about Japan, either in my own writing or the works of other’s, I felt a deep knot in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. It was a knot that told me that I had to go back, and a knot that told me that I could never go back. I was yearning for the past. I was yearning for a past that perhaps never even really existed. And of all the yearning we do in this yearn-filled life, this is perhaps the most foolish.

Eight years later, I am going to Japan. I am not going to My Japan. I am going to Japan. I am going to the Japan that all of us know, the Japan that we all agree on. Located in the Pacific Ocean just off of the Eastern Coast of Asia, between approximately 23 and 45 degrees latitude N (including Okinawa), and approximately 123 and 147 degrees longitude E (again, including Okinawa). A chain of islands famous for food such as sushi & ramen, cultural products such as anime & manga, and historical curiosities such as samurai & ninja. I am going to this real place called Japan, and there I will find exactly what is contained in the travel brochure.

I will not, as I concluded all those years ago, explode upon stepping out of the airplane. I will not be crushed by the weight of memories and dead dreams. I will not see a sign for a Saizeriya and burst out in tears. I am a normal person. I’m going to Japan on the kind of trip that normal people take.

I’m not going to travel back in time. I will be in Japan as the twenty-eight year-old me that I am. I will have new experiences and create new memories, not re-live the old. I will live my own life, not the life of some imaginary man that I wish I was.

I want to see Japan in real life. I want to see it as it is. I want to go to Japan and actually be there, rather than surround myself with the collapsing shell of insane dreams.

The man who desired to escape to His Japan is dead. His Japan died with him. That dead man and His Dead Japan now exist only in the archives of forgotten websites.

He longed to be destroyed. Escape to His Japan was a surrogate for that destruction. If he saw the world as it exists now, containing the Real Person and Real Japan that took his place, he would smile. He knew his dreams were nothing but lies; that’s why he dreamed them. What he couldn’t imagine was that there existed a corresponding truth for each of these lies, that there could exist a reality even more beautiful than his fantasy world. What he couldn’t imagine was that one day he might cross that Ocean again, not as an escape and not like a cannonball, but just to see what’s going on over there, and then come home.