Everything That Has to Happen First
In just over a month I’ll be on a plane heading east, and the fact that I keep announcing it instead of posting anything worth reading should tell you something about where I am right now. The thing I keep announcing is a year in Tokyo. The thing that’s actually happening is administrative carnage so comprehensive that I’m starting to wonder whether moving abroad is just bureaucracy’s way of testing how badly you want to leave.
There’s the visa process, which requires health insurance documentation, confirmed plane tickets, a signed apartment contract, passport photos that don’t make you look like a fugitive, a cover letter explaining why Japan should permit your entry, and a personal appearance at the Japanese embassy where a man will process your paperwork with the energy of someone who has heard every possible human excuse. Then there’s clearing out the apartment, which requires confronting the question of what to do with several years of accumulated things—sell them, give them away, drive them to your parents’, somehow consume them. Does anyone want old DVDs? A Wii? Asking for myself.
Then the tax situation, which exists in its own dimension of paperwork. Deregistering your address with the city. Canceling every contract you’ve ever signed. Pausing the ones you can’t cancel. Visiting what feels like every doctor on the continent, apparently now, apparently all at once. And woven through all of it, the quiet panic of having roughly thirty days left to learn enough Japanese to function as a human being in Tokyo. I’m not entirely sure what it would take to get chased through Shibuya by an angry mob, but I’d rather not find out through ignorance.
I’m also in the middle of building out a separate travel blog to contain the inevitable overflow of Japan content—the idea being that this journal doesn’t get swallowed whole by it. Setting that up has involved writing media kits for tourism boards and generally explaining myself in formal language to people who want to know my reach and my intentions. It’s a strange layer of professionalism to apply to what is essentially "I’m going to eat a lot of things and write about them."
So: patience requested. This is temporary. On the other side of all of this is Japan, and I keep telling myself I’m ready. The forms suggest otherwise.