My Life Journey // Chasing Cultures

(Shinjuku Tokyo, Japan / June ?, 2014)

I still remember the first moment I fully felt my culture.

There I was sitting in a brightly lite train on my morning commute from Yokahama to Shinjuku station, which usually took about 2 hours. I was stuck in my head more than a depressed adolescent in high school. Wondering to myself,

“ What the hell did I get myself into? I feel like a kindergartner in a man’s body here. I can’t read anything, speak anything, and find anything. I need my mama.”

I continued to look around this growing train from my plastic elephant gray corner seat. On the walls were ads. Ads that were filled with more indecipherable charterers that weren’t helping my thought process, or lack there off. I had to free myself from all of this, I needed my brain to clock out from trying to learn, understand, and navigate around this language. I needed a get out of jail free card. I needed a comic.

There is something about reading my language that helps me feel at home no matter where I go. The feeling of the US culture, which escapes from these flimsy white pages to the inner depths of my mind’s creativity.

I reached into my cat black backpack. The only thing that I could cling onto walking place to place in this busy yet electric city. What emerged was a Spider-man paper trade back comic book full of original issues that I grew up reading. This book became so used to this process by now, that the cover was obviously damaged by how often it was used in this routine.

There I was, in a train expanding full of people at every stop in this imagination provoking country, reading a comic to help me feel at home. Going through each page and forgetting where I was momentary until I would hear the PA system beeping music and telling me that we were at a new stop.

The train would take it’s needed stops, loading more than 15 people per a cart and then it resuming its tedious journey. I went in waves from reading to looking around not trying to make eye contact with anyone because we had 20 more minutes together. But then I saw it, a small Japanese boy of about six years old looking from his mother’s side over the railing at my comic.

I could see the awestruck look in his eyes. The twinkle that told me this was his first time seeing a foreigner so intently reading a book that was written in their own language, English.

I could see his curiosity, it was the same curiosity that fueled me when I was his age to go investigate other cultures. The curiosity that to this day keeps me feeling like a child, keeps me realizing that I don’t know everything on this planet, and the same curiosity that keeps me Chasing Cultures and feeling alive.

I was forever impacting this child on some sort of level, whether it be micro or macro. I hope that he will use this memory as I did on my own life to help me become who I am today.

T. Rietz