The Return That Changes Everything
There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes not from arriving somewhere new, but from returning to somewhere familiar. I have felt it twice now — the odd vertigo of stepping back onto Japanese soil after an extended period abroad and realising that the country has not changed as much as I have.
This essay is an attempt to make sense of that feeling.
What You Notice First
The first thing I noticed, both times, was the order. The queues at the airport immigration. The precise bowing of the customs officer. The train that arrived not just on time but with the doors aligned exactly to the painted marks on the platform. After years in places where such precision is the exception rather than the rule, I felt an almost physical relaxation — as if I had been unconsciously braced against chaos and could finally let go.
Then came the second wave: a slight sense of constriction. The same order that felt like relief also felt, within days, like pressure. The unspoken rules resurfacing. The awareness of how I was being perceived. The social choreography I had half-forgotten.
The Stranger in the Familiar
There is a German word — unheimlich — which translates roughly as "uncanny," but its literal meaning is "un-homely." It describes the feeling when something familiar becomes strange. Returning to Japan after time away produces something like this. The streets of your childhood are still there, but you now see them through eyes that have seen other streets. The food is still extraordinary, but you now have other reference points for what food can be.
You are, in the most literal sense, changed. And the place, of course, has not particularly waited for you.
What Absence Teaches
I have come to believe that leaving a place — really leaving it, not just visiting elsewhere — is one of the most clarifying things a person can do. You cannot see the shape of something you are standing inside. Distance, both physical and temporal, creates perspective.
Absence taught me what I actually loved about Japan versus what I had simply accepted without question. I learned that I genuinely love the depth of Japanese craft — the way a carpenter or a ceramicist or a ramen chef pursues their work with what can only be called devotion. I love the aesthetic sense, the understanding that a well-made space is good for the spirit. I love the seasonal attentiveness — the way the country feels the changing of seasons and marks them collectively.
What I found harder on return were the silences that are not peaceful but performative. The ways that harmony can sometimes mask things that need to be spoken.
Belonging Is Not a Binary
The most important thing returning home taught me is that belonging is not an either/or condition. You do not either belong somewhere or you don't. You can feel rooted in a place and also feel it does not hold the whole of you. You can feel foreign in your homeland and at home abroad, sometimes simultaneously.
Japan is home. It is also a place I am still, in some ways, learning to inhabit honestly. Perhaps that tension — between familiarity and discovery — is not a problem to be solved. Perhaps it is simply the texture of a considered life.
A Closing Thought
The Japanese have a concept called mono no aware — the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. Cherry blossoms are beautiful partly because they fall. Homecomings are meaningful partly because they reveal how time has passed. I think that is something I am, slowly, learning to sit with rather than resist.