RAINICHI 2023 #000 – An Introduction
May 30, 2024
Between September 2015 and January 2016, I lived in Japan. For the entirety of 2016, 2017, and 2018, I considered those five months the most important — if not the only important — months of my life. In September of 2023, I returned to Japan for a two-week visit.
I have chosen to chronicle that visit in a series of essays titled RAINICHI 2023. Rainichi (来日) simply means, “coming to Japan” or “visiting Japan.”
We can retroactively consider the essay Hello, Japan. Goodbye, My Japan to be RAINICHI 2023 #-001. In that essay, I made certain promises regarding the nature of my trip. After claiming to be both “a normal person” and “a regular guy,” I vowed to “go to Japan and actually be there, rather than surround myself with the collapsing shell of insane dreams,” and to “live my own life, not the life of some imaginary man that I wish I was.”
Let me not leave you in suspense: I kept those promises. I went to Japan exactly as I was, and I came back changed only in the sense that I was finally able to recognize what I had become. It is not often that one gets the chance to travel to a location so intrinsically connected to a brief portion of one’s past and see so clearly the contrast between what was then and what is now.
The greatest surprise was realizing that, in the time between leaving Japan in 2016 and returning in 2023, I had learned to speak the Japanese language. It had come to me so gradually and in such isolation that I hadn’t even truly known it was happening. While I could muddle a sentence together when I lived there, I never felt that I could actually speak Japanese. Although, we could argue that a bigger problem at that time had been that I was so shy that I couldn’t speak to anyone in any language.
Japan, of course, had changed too, but not in ways that a traveller could recognize in a two-week trip. Technological changes, while significant, mirrored developments at home and were easily taken for granted. Much of the knowledge I had acquired regarding social etiquette, the ways in which different types of restaurants worked, transit systems, etc. remained relevant.
When we returned from our RAINICHI, many people asked us about our trip. I very quickly grew tired of these conversations. I never felt that I was adequately able to explain what had happened there. My weariness of these conversations meant that I didn’t write about the trip, either. I found the idea boring. I always make plans to write travelogues when I go on trips, but when I get home and begin to write, all I can think is, “I know! I was just there!” It has now been long enough that I can feel the pleasure of reminiscence as I write. I am not just describing my trip to Japan, I am reminding myself of my trip to Japan, which is something else entirely.
The structure of our trip looked something like this:
Most nights, we were stationed at “Home Base”; namely, our friends’ apartment in Tokyo. From there, we explored Tokyo and its surrounding areas, including a day trip to my old “stomping grounds” in Mito, Ibaraki. Midway through the first week, we took a train down to Kamakura, where we stayed for one night, and then to Hakone, where we also stayed for one night. We then returned to Home Base for two nights, before taking the Shinkansen way out west to Osaka, on our way to our other friends’ place in Wakayama. After a few days in Wakayama, we once again stopped over in Osaka on our way back to Tokyo, from where we flew back home.
In Tokyo, we were with our friends: a dorm-mate of mine when I lived in Japan, and his wife. In Kamakura, Hakone, and Osaka, we were by ourselves. In Wakayama, we were with my wife’s homestay mother from the time of her own visit to Japan. These constituted three distinct “types” of travel, characterized by different kinds of activities and conversations. On a two-week trip, such changes of pace are nice to have. My dad said the other day, quoting a friend of his, that “guests are like fish,” meaning that you don’t want to keep them around in the house for much longer than three days. (This is, of course, referring to dead fish, not pet fish.) We managed to (mostly) avoid wearing out our welcome by not staying in one place for more than a few nights at a time, although I have the feeling that when we left our Tokyo friends’ apartment to head for the Shinkansen, they were more than happy to deflate the air-mattress that took up a good chunk of their one-bedroom apartment and hang out by themselves for a little while.
During the trip, I took note of everything that occurred on each day, so that I wouldn’t get confused later. Thus, compared to most of my trips down my memory lane, there will be fewer blank spaces, misremembered names/chronologies, and total confusions. Instead, the loyal reader will be treated to a completely accurate account of events.
Having successfully and perhaps overzealously introduced the reader to the work, I should now present its actual beginning.
However, before doing that, allow me to indulge the reader with:
RAINICHI 2023 #000.5 - An Immediate Digression Concerning the Japanese Language
Previously:
Hello, Japan. Goodbye, My Japan (RAINICHI 2023 #-001)
RAINICHI 2023: