Japan is the future.
I recently had an eventful and transformative trip to Japan for work. I visited Osaka to help manage the 2023 World YoYo Contest, then spent some time in Iwakura with friends working on Caribou Lodge business stuff, had an amazing business meeting in Tokyo followed by a few days of more yoyo stuff there before heading home. I shot 5 rolls of film on a half-frame camera, got like 20 useable shots out of it (lol cry), dealt with slightly more yoyo-related drama than usual, ate a ton of amazing food, caught up with old friends, and generally had a nice sort of emotional reset to get ready for a busy rest of the year and a super fucking intense 2024.
I love visiting Japan. There’s this thing that the Japanese do in public, which is treat the strangers around them respectfully, that doesn’t exist much in the US. I never saw a single person talking on their phone on speaker in three weeks. I barely saw anyone talking on their phone in public at all. That would be rude, so people don’t do it. If someone bumped into me they excused themselves quickly, if my pronunciation of something was total shit I was corrected kindly and then they quickly moved on from it, and so on. In the US, people will cheerfully inconvenience you if it makes what they’re doing in that moment just 1% easier or saves them two whole seconds of their time. Americans want what they want, they want it now, and they generally don’t give much of a fuck about whoever is around them. If the pandemic didn’t make it super clear that much of America doesn’t give a shit about you, 10 minutes in any supermarket here should remind you quickly. It was really nice to be away from that for a few weeks. Like I got to refill my humanity meter.
When you can walk around a busy city without fear or concern, when you can ride a train for 2 hours without seeing a single TikTok dance or hearing a single phone conversation, you can get a lot of thinking done. It was lovely, being left to my own thoughts, without being forced to participate in other people’s lives or content. I’m getting older, and it’s exhausting to constantly feel like I need to dodge things just to get through my day. I love that in Japan, people assume that your life is already loud enough, busy enough, tiring enough, and feel enough compassion for you to not add to it. It’s a kindness that I really enjoyed, and returning home has made me sorely miss it.
I’m trying hard not to dwell on how much I don’t enjoy living in America. I’m trying to think about how nice it was to be in crowded public places without feeling like I always needed to know where an exit was or if there was something I could hide under if someone started shooting, instead of thinking about how fucking horrible it is that I think about these things every time I leave my house here. It would be great if I could just focus on how good I felt while I was there instead of focusing on how hard it is to raise my family here in this place that I feel like cares nothing for us and might kill us.
Nowhere is perfect. Japan has its shadows, its failings, its own flavors of awfulness. But being able to go through my days without the base level of stress and fear that America invokes in me was really goddamn nice for a while.
I’m sure it’s less rose-tinted if you live there. I’m sure I would find things to be infuriated by. But it would be nice to be angry about an injustice without also being afraid for my family’s safety. Japan wins for sure on that one.
Originally published at https://unklesteve.substack.com.
