The End of the Beginning
The runway starts moving faster, and I’m crying. Not for a photo. Not performing something. Real tears, the kind you don’t plan for. I knew this moment was coming—I’d been waiting for it, dreading it, trying not to think about it. But I didn’t expect to feel like this.
Three months in Tokyo. That’s what I’m leaving behind. The specific gravity of it hits me now, wheels up, somewhere over the ocean.
I met extraordinary people. I ate things I’d never imagined. I walked through neighborhoods that shouldn’t exist outside science fiction—places where the ancient and the hypermodern occupy the same block, where everyone’s polite until they’re not, where the pace is frantic and the temples are silent. You hear stories about Japan. Most of them are true. But stories flatten it. They can’t hold the actual experience of being there, the overwhelming density of small perfections and cultural strangeness that made every day feel like I was living in two centuries at once, or on another planet entirely. I felt more at home there than anywhere else I’ve ever been.
Everything people say about Japan is accurate but incomplete. The stories don’t capture what it’s actually like to live inside it—not the photography of it, the lived texture. The wet smell of a Tokyo morning. The sound of a vending machine every few feet. The way convenience stores are genuinely there at three a.m. and stock things you didn’t know you needed: Asahi Super Dry, onigiri, green tea. The trains arrive exactly on time, every time. The Shibuya crossing at night. AKB48 playing everywhere. Shiina Ringo. Ikimono Gakari. The weird fact that even fire alarms have little smiling faces. Everyone reading manga in public. Arcade bars where you play 16-bit games while drinking. Schoolgirls everywhere—actually attractive, not a fantasy—and you can touch Pikachu and eat grapefruit crash ice and nobody bothers you if you don’t flag someone down at a restaurant because the system just works. The whole country seems built from limited-edition soft drinks. The river in Kyoto is so quiet it feels medicinal. The Tottori dunes are genuinely beautiful. Osaka’s arcades are pure neon chaos. Tokyo’s fashion is restless and alive.
What kills me now—what I’m already scared of—is that this will become a gray memory, a dream I woke up from, a place I can’t return to. The faces will dissolve. The feelings will dim. It’ll be a thing that happened to someone else.
But there’s something keeping me from total despair. Before I went, I made a plan. I’d forgotten about it—three months of living distracted me—but the takeoff reminded me. This wasn’t meant to be the whole thing. It was a test. A long preview. To see if Japan was as good in reality as it was in my head. To figure out which city I actually wanted to live in. Whether this whole idea was real or just something I’d convinced myself I wanted.
I didn’t have a single bad moment there that didn’t trace back to something I was stressed about in Berlin. That alone tells me something needs to change.
The Japanese embassy approved a work holiday visa. I’m going back in early 2013 for a year. I can work remotely—I’ve been doing it for years. A woman I met in Tokyo, who lives in Berlin now, offered to help me learn the language seriously, said it’s easier than HTML. So there’s actually a plan here.
The runway disappears beneath us. I’m still crying, but different now. Not goodbye. Preliminary goodbye. I know I’m coming back, better prepared, for longer, with people there who are waiting for me. With a whole year ahead instead of a provisional three months.
I lean back in my seat and put on Utada Hikaru. Because that’s what you listen to on a flight away from Tokyo when you know you’re going back.