Going Back

When I first set out for Japan at the age of twenty-four, my final landing was at Itami airport in Osaka. Japanese friends I had made in college lived in that area, leading to the, in retrospect, monumental decision to make Osaka my final destination instead of famous Tokyo. They picked me up in the dark winter evening of my arrival, and thus I embarked on the adventure of my life. My first stay was at a friend's house in the hills around Nara, where I woke up the next morning on a cold winter day, looked out the window, and saw a frost coated rice field tucked in between a road and a hill, and scattered with oriental-shaped bundles of hay. This was my first view of Japan.

For the next four and a half years, I lived an intense new life. Finally isolated from family influence (AKA interference), everything I accomplished there was mine. And there was much to accomplish. Language, culture, customs, stimulating new friends; all this plus my determination to relate to the Japanese on their terms, a pursuit that, I humbly add, put me a step ahead and served me well in the future. So to my great fortune, I wound up spending my latter twenties in an environment of virtually minute-by-minute reward after reward. Every time I spoke, I felt satisfaction at having communicated in an exotic language. Every time I made a new friend in Japanese, I gloried in having done so without pandering to the "I-speak-English" mentality common among foreigners. I could go on and on. Then, I left. A job opportunity: off to Tokyo. The beginning of my next life. New adventure took over and Osaka was gone. But it wasn't gone, not really.

During all the succeeding years working in Tokyo and living in nearby Yokohama, I hardly ever considered visiting Osaka. Thoughts of friends and memories of my "place" in the Osaka scene visited me now and then, but, in the same way I have no interest in high school reunions, I saw no point in going back. I had gone on. But I guess the time had come, because during my stay in Japan last year, hitherto vague notions coalesced into an idea to be acted on. It would be nice, I thought, to make a pilgrimage there, a sort of homecoming. I initiated a preliminary search for old friends, trying old phone numbers with odd results. (I didn't know that ten years ago an extra digit had been added to Osaka phone numbers.) Then I found one on the Internet, who knew another. A few minutes later I had talked to them both over the phone for the first time in twenty years. This sealed the deal and I set the dates for the trip.

I took the shinkansen (bullet train) the two hours and fifteen minutes from Yokohama to Osaka, a remarkably smooth ride. At the Osaka station, I set foot on the platform in the humid heat of the Osaka summer and took in the distinctive Osaka air. Familiarity came rushing back to me. Two subway stops and a short walk later and I was at my lodgings. The guy at the front desk: good gosh, his deep Osaka dialect. And that accent! I could now hear the Osaka accent, and finally realized how startled my first Tokyo acquaintances must have been at my Osaka-inspired Japanese. (Its particularities started insinuating themselves back into my Japanese, too, especially under the influence of beer.) From check in, my time in Osaka was packed with "experiencing". I wandered the streets, gazed at new and old buildings, and met up with five people I hadn't seen in twenty years, some Japanese, some American. The more I caught up, the more I saw how much my life there had meant to me. And I was back! I fit right back in. Inexplicably, my Tokyo life—despite having been much longer—receded to the status of mere footnote to Osaka's major narrative.

Some things had changed. The Higashi-Umeda branch of Berlitz, where I used to teach English (a job I detested), was no longer, my previous apartment building was crumbling away and, according to a neighbor woman, unlivable, owner not to be found (a rather unusual circumstance, I should add), and the Osaka apartments where an ex-girlfriend used to live had turned into a...

...gay club :(. Before I figured this out, the guys working in the ramen shop on the first floor had to have seen me standing outside across the street, staring up at the floors above with melancholy longing.

While at an "izakaya" (a typical eating/drinking place) with my two Japanese friends, I asked if they had ever searched for me on the Internet, as I had for them. Nope, never had. True, sometimes they had wondered what had ever happened to me, as I had simply dropped out of sight after leaving. One reason (excuse) they gave for never trying was that they didn't know how to spell my last name. They had me there.

I arrived in Osaka on a Thursday and left the next Sunday. But those few days reconnected me with a past that, in the glow of an exciting new future in Tokyo, I had thoughtlessly shoved onto a back shelf in a dark closet. Yet, the time was ripe for it to come out again and restore its place in my life, reminding me of where I had been and, more importantly to me, from what direction I had since come. It was as if all this time I had been trailing a ribbon whose other end I had lost sight of. Now I had traced it back and found where it was tied.

For several days afterwards, Tokyo/Yokohama seemed so pale. Osaka is, after all, thick with character. And a friendliness pervades it that sets it apart from reserved Tokyo. I got used to Tokyo again, but was more than a little pleased that I had dug up my Japanese roots and reincorporated them into my life.

So that's what I am these days, a guy with five lives so far: up to college, college, Osaka Japan, Tokyo Japan, and US repatriate. Kind of wonder what's next.