Last Night in Tokyo
"To see a world in a [bowl of ramen]." William Blake, almost.
It’s been a sec—I’ve been stuck on this story for a month, needing to tell it but wanting to get it right. Unfortunately, it won’t fit in an email. Fortunately, it’s done, and we’ll be back to more regular programming soon. Thx!
Memory is a story. Our very own personal historical fiction. Facts, recalled correctly, can be placed out of order. Feelings can be re-colored, quotes paraphrased, context curated, perspective tinted, filtered, and shifted. This is what I remember now and feels right, though some of it is likely wrong.
Alice and I ate our ramen in silence.
Except for the slurping—which was loud and unselfconscious, joining the small, inspired chorus of fellow one a.m. diners. It’d been a long day at the end of a long trip. Both good, though. Both, even, great. We were tired and there wasn’t much left to say, about anything. Not so tired not to get ramen, however; particularly this stuff. We sat at the window counter of the narrow second story room, looking down over the narrower alley below, full of bars next to bars on top of other bars but fallen quiet on that Tuesday evening-Wednesday morning, and wet. It was the last and most memorable meal of our time there. In fact it was several lasts, all at once.
— — —
I finished the second semester of my junior year at Northeastern University and flew home to LA. Two short, sunny weeks later I anxiously boarded a red-eye back to Boston, arriving several bleary hours before the scheduled meeting time for the Dialogue of International Relations in Japan; my six-week summer study-abroad program. I knew no one else on the trip. Mostly I signed up because I wanted to go to Japan, like how in high school I mostly joined chorus because I wanted to go to Germany for spring break. I lived a hard life then, lacking in opportunities and means except to travel abroad every couple of years on the thinnest of whims. Though, I could at least count Japan as extracurricular credit. The course, “International Affairs,” wasn’t so far removed from Economics, my major, that the idea was totally ridiculous. In high school I discovered I liked choir, anyway; maybe in Japan I’d discover a passion for policy. I read The Economist, after all. Sometimes.
I struggled to nap for a little while on a cold bucket chair in the ticketing area of Logan’s (Boston Logan International’s) international terminal. I was crawling with butterflies, in two phenotypes: one, the nervy kind that appear before meeting new people, especially in large groups; the other, the anticipatory kind that make a habitat of airports and chilly mornings, that flutter in a hopeful thrill for exciting events impending, flight, travel, a gaze full of unknown. They settled on me as I finally began to doze—then burst in a cloud as the other students began to arrive.
I was lucky to meet Vinny first. He was a shaggy-haired East Coast Italian, a latter-day intellectual hippie who could talk raw tomatoes and beef into ragu. He was some combination of Economics, International Affairs, and Poli-Sci, and he knew everyone. We chatted for a little bit, and then, strategically, I sat next to him and introduced myself to each new person that Vinny called over as the suitcases rolled in. I tried not to be weird; a lost cause, because in trying not to be weird you’re already doing something most people aren’t doing, which is sort of the definition of “weird.” And, yes, we’re all our own weird, but back then I expected better of people, that everyone else was certainly less weird than me. I hadn’t worked in restaurants yet.
The study abroad composed a varied group: some brainy Greek jocks, some cool nerds, some nerd nerds, a few bonafide Internationals, a couple wild cards and everyone else a little bit of everything. The leading professor had a bit of a following among his former pupils—they’d joke around with him, but were clearly determined to impress. The TAs/chaperones appeared easygoing enough. A real mixed bag of college personalities, but not incendiary, it seemed. I hadn’t decided who I should be yet, so mainly I just smiled and cracked the occasional joke. Better to be unnoticed than off-putting, in the early days.
We went through security, and on to Japan.
— — —
Tokyo was the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Inbound from the airport in Narita, the highway sweeps around the eastern outskirts of the city, presenting a panoramic view of its towering skyline and endless sprawl. LA is broad, too; but its innumerable neighborhoods are at least broken up by freeways, hills, and small mountains. You can piece the jigsaw of it together, figure it out. New York is also tall, and claustrophobic, bigger even than it appears on screen—but with hard, defining limits at the rivers, the outlying boroughs simultaneously part of the city and completely distinct from it. A dense, but fathomable metropolis. Tokyo is both, together, all at once. When you’re in it, it’s a labyrinth, a macrocosm. You feel swallowed whole. But not unpleasantly so, if you’re a city kid.
Our first days thrust us cold (culturally) and soaking (literally) into Japan. A monsoon fell the first night, a constant crash of water on pavement, plastic, and metal, drumming until its sudden cease. We hunkered uncomfortably inside; our hostel seemed built for smaller, more modular people. We crammed six healthy young American boys into a room the size of a third of a room, on two sets of bunk beds, a trundle, and the floor. The bathrooms were shared, in the hall, and there was a sink on top of the toilet. The shower was a closet I barely fit into; my shoulders bumped the walls if I moved more than an inch in any direction. The management told us on our first night that we were loud, and we’d eventually be asked not to linger in front of the hostel at night, because of all the noise of our (admittedly tipsy) talking. If we needed to chat, there were bars elsewhere, or the busy avenue just down the way. The hostel became strictly for sleep, work, and quiet. And the occasional forbidden stairway makeout.
“Dialogue” is mostly a clever title for any Northeastern summer study abroad program—but in our case it was literal. After about a day we were paired up with political students from Tokyo’s Meiji University for a cultural exchange that would last the entire trip. That weekend we bussed to a lakeside camp near Mount Fuji, an enormous active volcano and one of Japan’s most recognizable landmarks. The mountain is highly visible on clear days from all parts of Tokyo, hours away, and forms the fantastical archetype of the lone mountain, with vast, wide slopes sweeping up to a snowy peak, often shrouded in clouds. If you’ve heard of Japan, you’ve seen Fuji.
At the foot of Fuji are several lakes, and ours was called Yamanaka, the university’s camp located a short walk uphill from its shore. There we set our weekend bags down and got the camp-&-culture tour. We were presented with our blue rubber indoor slippers (not one pair the appropriate size for the wearer); then shown the onsen (shared washing room) where we’d bathe on squat hardwood stools, each with an extendable showerhead that Americans would typically see only in luxury homes or hotels; then instructed to prepare our tatami mats, where we’d sleep (here a blast of nostalgia as I realized this was the thing I used to sleep on at my Hawaiian grandmother’s house). Once settled, we played a little basketball and then moved inside to get to know each other better, beginning with our thoughts on the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was a shock—we certainly weren’t expecting that topic to open the conversation with our new pals. And in retrospect, it was a bit of a cheap tactic to jumpstart those relations. But it worked. The bombings are the horrifying elephant in the room between any American and Japanese that must at some point be addressed. It is also an oddly safe question. Who (on a trip like this) is going to say that the bombs were good? So, we agreed that the act was terrible, and that we all hoped such devices would never be deployed again, ever, anywhere, and the elephant was escorted away. Between that and the long string of drinking games we exchanged later that night, our first real lesson of the trip became obvious: “We’re not so different after all!” Which is a thing everyone on Earth knows about everyone else, but that everyone also forgets, and must constantly be reminded.
The next morning I rose early, a little cotton-mouthed but mostly un-hungover. I bathed quickly, bashfully, and thankfully solitarily atop the hard stool in the onsen. I went for a walk, about a mile down the tree-covered trail along the lake. It was still and cool, a little misty. I have always felt a powerful urge to be alone after being amongst. To worry about nothing and no one but myself, for a while. Sometimes, after particularly intense society, I need the time and the space to find myself again, and consider how I have changed. Whether I should let the change take, or cling steadfast to who I was. I walked down to the water and looked across the dappled surface at the long slope of Fuji, just visible through the fading fog, and remembered suddenly that I was in Japan, that these were special days not to be taken lightly, not to be undergone through the motions. Probably not a time to be steadfast. I decided to let the change take, and to continue to let it take me, as long as I was here.
It felt momentous. Of course it did—I was alone except for the exhaled ghost of my own breath, standing on the shore of a still lake full of ancient fish and drifting, slumbering swans, praying (or something like it) at the foot of one of the famous mountains of the world. For a little while, I was a static feature of a painted landscape. Japan is wonderful for being a static feature of a painted landscape, and in such a place all thoughts and decisions feel momentous. But what you never realize in the process of being changed, even when you’re aware of it, even when you believe you are consciously allowing it, is that being changed is the simple thing. Staying changed is the test.
— — —
You know how it goes.
We were college kids far from home. We were unexpectedly brilliant and expectedly stupid. We were ecstatic and loud and accidentally rude. We were conscious and careful and respectful, and we were ignorant and silly and hurtful. With everyone we met, and with our Japanese friends, and especially with each other. But for all that, we mostly got along well.
There were classes, which were important, and gave us a brief cultural context of Japan past and present, and I remembered the material exactly long enough to pass the course. It was a microcosm of my college experience in that way. When I think of those five years, I never think of classes, though I did actually go to most of them and did fairly well, grades-wise. Instead I think of everything else: friends and travel and musical theater, which I did at first for fun, then increasingly out of necessity. Japan was the same. We were there for class, but the important takeaways came entirely from elsewhere.
For one:
I was already a lapsed Christian by then, by a few years. There was a pivotal choice involved in that, but not exactly whether to believe or to not believe in God. It was, like so many consequential decisions, deeply anticlimactic, obscured in the clutter of living.
Shortly after the start of my freshman year, I was in the process of deciding how I’d spend my extracurricular time. Church had been a major part of my life from birth through high school. I Believed, thoroughly and assuredly. But at college, I chose not to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes or any of the other Christian social clubs for the same reason I chose not to try out for club volleyball, which itself was an extension of the reason I found myself in Boston, and not Orange County: it was time for something different. That was another time of change, a more obvious time, and I sought it out and consciously allowed it, then, too (some of it, at least). The change that occurred at that time stuck because I lived in it, and kept living in it for five years. That’s a way to harden change—stay put in the place that changed you. Immerse yourself in the new ways until they become the natural ways. It wasn’t instantaneous, but in Boston the Belief bled out of me over time, its assuredness dwarfed by its growing inconsequentiality. I stopped praying at night, I stopped going back to church when I was home for break. Later, when I finally realized what had shifted, and how much, I did officially decide that I didn’t want to be the Believer anymore; and at the time I pitied him.
In Japan I had my first encounter with a spiritualism outside the monotheistic. Shinto and Buddhism. Shrines and temples. Quiet rituals and meditations. Water, breath, and torii. Our guides shared the history of each place, what things were and why people did that, the symbols and the symbolism. We were encouraged to wander and explore, to participate if so moved. Churches are designed with clear focal points: all attention front, center, up, to the stage and to the cross, which Jesus may or may not be mounted upon, where he may or may not be bleeding, depending how sanitized the sect. In the first shrines I kept looking for that; the focal point, the Big Thing to visit, to witness, to worship, that must be in the middle. And there are small temples central to many shrines where visitors and congregants alike gather to light incense and offer silent prayers. Some have famously large statues or ancient trees or other artifacts. But in many of them you are encouraged to let your gaze and your feet fall where they will around the grounds, as though the shrine or temple is gently ushering, “Consider this small, bubbling fountain. Does this help today? If not, perhaps this way, through the torii…” and so on down the many paths. Walk, pause, consider. Not, “Look here, think this.” Not, “Behold, The Lesson For Today.” Not the purpose-driven game, the grace-given versus the wretched damned.
Which is absolutely not to say that our trip was spent in thoughtful meditation and contemplation of the divine. If anything, much of it was spent in thoughtful meditation and contemplation of what we should eat. And more importantly, drink.
There were dozen-plate trips to the local conveyor sushi joint. There were dinners at Michelin-rated restaurants, a one-star and two-star, both Italian (the one-star, which boasted twenty seats and two employees, was better). There were gritty izakayas with “pints” bigger than your head and chewy, briney sunomono (octopus) salad and crispy, fatty karaage (fried chicken). There was one memorable Mexican restaurant where the food was godawful (the only bad stuff I ate on the trip) but redeemed by the bath-sized “Party Margarita”, a massive glass centerpiece with ten straws perched on its rim that someone had clearly poured a handle of tequila into and waved a lime somewhere in the vicinity of and not even for a second considered mixing anything more with. There was mazemen, tsukemen, and almost every day, ramen: spicy, miso, shoyu, shio, tonkotsu, some bowls minimal, as though dressed with tweezers, others overflowing with generous abundance.
We ate soba and tempura on mats in a cavernous room, and were taught the ceremony of consuming it, and the intensive process of making—crafting—the handcut buckwheat soba noodles, whose flavors were too subtle for me. The tempura was crisp, grease-less and better cooked than any fried thing I’ve eaten outside the Gulf Coast (another region which seems to guard closely the secret to frying crisply and lightly).
There were also traditional foods less familiar to me. Many pickled and fermented dishes: fish and vegetables, mostly, and mostly for breakfast, an ambitious ask of my Western stomach. But even what I didn’t love I appreciated, the flavors at minimum interesting and new. Except for natto. Snotty, slimy, gunky beans that my Japanese friends couldn’t wait for me to try, for breakfast, once someone (Vinny) told them I was a “foodie.” Now, I was, and am, a gracious guest. I eat what’s in front of me and am thankful for it. I ate one natto bean and was so immediately revolted that I thought I was imagining it. I ate another and spat it back out. My hosts loved the entire scene, as was their right.
Some of the best food was fast. There was a little cafe conveniently located between the hostel and the university called “Chococro” that specialized in, you guessed it, chocolate croissants. They were not Parisian pan au chocolate, they were chococros: small croissants with just enough chocolate and plenty of butter, many-layered and not at all bready. You could eat them in two bites if you wanted, and I did, which is why I usually got two. The McDonald’s in Japan is tremendous—you can’t tell me you aren’t at least a little thrilled when you walk into a McDonald’s in another country, anticipating both the unique items they offer and the higher standards of quality—though I probably leaned on it a little too often. There was one infamous meal where I outright refused to eat McDonald’s for the second time in a day, in the middle of a scavenger hunt—which cost our team the hunt after we wasted a half-hour searching for something else to eat, only to wind up back at McDonald’s, hungrier and more frustrated.
Far more than anything else, we made meals of the glorious goods found in Family Mart, Lawson’s, and 7/11. It is not new news that the products of Japan’s convenience stores are excellent beyond the American imagination. Take the cool, buttery, crustless egg salad sandwich on white bread; or the tender fried chicken thighs (in America, “boneless wings”) under the heat lamp. The endless varieties of Pocky, especially matcha, cookies ‘n cream, and banana. The boxed coconut-flavored boba drink, with an odd texture at first sip but acceleratingly addictive. For dessert, Coolish: soft-serve vanilla ice cream in a squeezey pouch, one of the ultimate frozen treats and among the more mind-boggling non-exports to American stores. We’d rather have poorly-mixed milkshakes or a Drumstick (though there’s always the Chocotaco).
So we ate, a lot and well. We drank, a lot and less well, but not poorly. We studied and prepared final projects, the usual essays and presentations. Some of us went out nightly, or almost nightly—once, to the clubbiest club I’d ever clubbed at, a veritable palace of dance, a bombardment of flashing lights and hammering bass that seemed to use my body as the drum, with no less than five distinct dance floors and 20,000 people on them. Another morning, a few of us assembled at three a.m. for a witching hour pilgrimage to the old Tsukiji Fish Market, where the most expensive fish in the world were auctioned, the gargantuan bluefin tuna (the old market would be razed for the 2020 Olympic Games). We sat on the floor of a bone-cold bungalow waiting room from two to three a.m., huddled and hungover, then were escorted through the market, buzzing scooters and tiny trucks hauling hundreds of thousands of dollars of fish whizzing through the drizzle around us, our clumsy isle of awe and raised phones stumbling through the midst of a functional sort of chaos; then into the auction warehouse to see the millions in pounds of tuna, each of them bigger than most of us, and worth well more than an asshole or an economist (likely an asshole economist) would rate our projected collegiate value.
There were more adventures and destinations, too many to list.
And then it was the last day.
— — —
Like I said, for the most part, we’d all gotten along pretty well by the end of the trip. I counted a good number of our group as friends, and the rest I felt good enough about but you can’t be close with everyone. My paper and presentation were coming along fine, but weren’t exactly groundbreaking. Something about the Trans-Pacific Partnership: a pan-Pacific, counter-China “free” trade agreement that I’m already bored of talking about. I did not discover a passion for policy.
All ducks counted, it had been a real super duper time, and I had been a part of it, and was happy with that. So I was a bit surprised when our professor asked me, of all people, to give a speech at the closing dinner. (All right, not totally surprised. I knew the TAs liked my journals because I made them entertaining even when I didn’t want to write them, which was most of the time, and they had told the professor as much. That’s half of giving a speech—writing it—and it was also known that I was a theater kid, so…writer + actor = speechgiver. Even then it was still unexpected. There’s a part of me that’s always surprised to be noticed.) I was simultaneously flattered and horrified. I said something like, “Oh. Uh, yeah. Okay. Sure. Okay, yeah. No problemo,” with a very confident double thumbs-up. Which is the kind of response you give when you are suddenly confronted with a major double thumbs-down problemo, but not one you can run away from.
That entire day I fretted. I’d written an outline of what I wanted to say with few concrete lines, more afraid of committing to any certain words than of improvising. Speeches are meant to be presented, spoken directly to your specific audience, not read at them. The last person I wanted to be up there was a jitterbug with his face buried in a crinkled-up piece of paper—nothing sadder. Much better to be a jitterbug who looks people in the eye while he quivers from head to toe.
It came time for us to head over to the university for the dinner. The event was held in a reception room exactly like all reception rooms proliferate upon the face of the modern world, with beige sound-absorbing walls and a forgettably-patterned dark carpet, white-clothed buffet tables and high tops, a temporary bar hiding cases of cheap wine and coolers of beer, and rows of gleaming silver chafing dishes against the wall. A Meiji U-branded podium stood on one side of the room, flanked by a pair of tall, black, rented speakers. (I felt lucky to know how to use a microphone. A lot of smart people think they know how to use microphones. Then they get in front of one and turn stupid. They point their face away so their voice projects outside the sound-capture cone and lose entire thoughts and paragraphs to muted mumbling. Or worse, they hold the mic in their hand and waggle it around so its pointing everywhere but at their mouth, only getting every tenth word if they’re lucky. The trick to not being mic-stupid is not to point the mic at your face; it’s to point your face at the mic, from real close, and keep it there. That’s it. Send this to everyone you know who’s scheduled to give a wedding speech, and send me a dollar in thanks.) The view from the room was at least nice, though. The windows looked east, across the cityscape and away from the sun, just beginning to darken and set. I ate two small bites of whatever and gulped down a beer too fast, made some inane chatter, looked out the window. Then the professor went up to the podium and was saying some things and one of those things was my name.
I don’t really know what I said up there. No evidence exists of the speech, but I’ve held onto snippets in my head. I know I threw my friend Matt immediately under the bus to lighten up the room (on the night of the drinking games in Mt. Fuji, he spent a significant and public amount of time in the bathroom, and that’s a situation that transcends language barriers). I know I got distracted at one point by the deepening orange light painting the buildings out the window. I know I choked up towards the end, something about that night being the last time with this group of people, which can be a cheap boilerplate sentiment unless the people in the room really do matter to each other, and it really is the last time, both of which were true. That’s all I remember. But people seemed to like it, and I know at least that I said what I meant. When I finished someone handed me another beer and I gulped that down even faster than the first.
Half a third beer later there was a small commotion in the hall outside the reception room. I peeked out the door and saw that a mixed crowd had gathered around the entrance to the women’s restroom. Inside there was a floor-to-ceiling portrait window that faced west—directly at the sunset. Almost all sunsets are pretty, and many are beautiful, and a few are distinctly memorable. In the moment, they are all at least worth appreciating. But as happens, this one was genuinely extraordinary; the kind of sunset that drapes colors over the world that you feel you’ve never seen, and might never see again. It was a bookmark on the evening, more lasting than any speech or sentiment. We scrunched into the bathroom and took mediocre pictures and selfies and watched it all the way down. Or, almost all the way. I left shortly before it vanished, not wanting to see it gone.
Then, we went out.
One of the only concrete items on my pre-trip list of Japan must-dos was: “Golden Guy.” A friend had recommended it to me—“It’s like these little alleys with tiny bars that seat like two to ten people, and each bar has a theme, like there’s a Carrot Bar and an American Bar and a BDSM bar and a bunch of different music bars, and you just spend all night hopping to the next open seat at the next bar…”—and of course it sounded, to my late collegiate ears, pretty freakin’ awesome. The problem was, when I got to Japan, I couldn’t find it on Google Maps; and when I asked my Japanese friends about it, they only looked confused. On our last day in Japan though, I searched one final time, and for whatever reason that time Google finally asked, “Do you mean Golden Gai?” (Why my Japanese friends didn’t understand this still boggles me, because when we arrived at Golden Gai they said, “Ohhh! You meant Golden Gai!” The English ‘guy’ and Japanese ‘gai’ are pronounced exactly the same.) So after the reception wound down, we hopped on the train to Shinjuku.
Shinjuku is one of the busiest parts of Tokyo—which is everywhere a busy city—and where much of the nightlife is, as well as that famous intersection with that famous dog. Golden Gai is a short walk from the station, though you can’t see the neighborhood until you’re standing in front of it. We walked right past the understated alley entrances at first, then slowly doubled back. Once you do see it, it’s impressive; like a speakeasy that’s an entire square block, except actually cool and not just trying to be, and about 700% less populated by pale men in trilbys and vests. It’s a dark maze of alleys tight enough to touch both sides with your arms extended, the eyeline littered with glowing, flashing, sputtering signage for Jack Daniels, Asahi, highballs, and the names of bars: “PIECE,” “Dream Bar,” “WHO,” “Golden Dust.” The place would be seedy if it wasn’t touristy, though it wasn’t too much of that, either. As it was, it seemed a perfect kind of place to get lost in, and spat out with the sunrise.
The thing about lots of tiny bars is that you can’t all go to the same bar. Our group of about 20 immediately sundered; three of us, Alice, Dan, and I, wandered deep down one alley into the first bar with three open stools. We chatted with the bartender over the first round; this was apparently his after-dark gig. He’d work in an office all day, get off, come straight here to open the bar, work until sometime between two and four a.m., close, then wake up at eight and do it again. I was no stranger to short sleep but this was another level. We had a couple drinks and toasted to the beginning of the next morning.
Here I think we went to another bar—but I’m not sure. At some point Dan ducked off to join a group that had discovered a club (where the unfortunate Matt of the Bathroom would be targeted for a credit card scam, the poor bastard). I waited in a long line to pee at Family Mart. It got to be late-late. Alice and I glanced at another couple bars, waffled about whether to head back, and then noticed a beacon amongst the signage: “RAMEN / OPEN.” It sat above an ascending stairway with a flickering light, out of which filtered the sounds of busy conversation and clink-clatter of plateware, and the luring aroma of deep bowls of salty-savory-porky-noodle goodness. There was no decision. We entered, automatically.
I learned later that Anthony Bourdain visited this shop in an early season of No Reservations. “Sugoi Niboshi Ramen Nagi Golden Gai,” which sort of means, “Awesome Dried-Fish Broth” Ramen Nagi Golden Gai. Ramen Nagi is one of the better-known chains in Japan, though this location is unique in that it serves only one kind of ramen: “niboshi,” or sardine broth, with handcut flat noodles as wide as napkins (like little sheets), topped with bamboo shoots, scallions, and a generous portion of char siu (pork). I am a devoted patron of all late-night booze foods, from tripas burritos in tongue-searing salsa roja to bacon-wrapped onion-smothered cart-dogs to greasy broiled-crisp pizza slices; none stand up to that bowl. It was rich, effuse with intense and unrelenting flavor, fishy but not too, salty, herby, and funky, descending still further into indescribable layers as great ramen does. The noodles were chewy and interesting, and the best bites were of the fatty pork belly wrapped in one of the napkin-noodles, chased with an extra spoonful of broth. We ate it to the dregs and wandered back out into the sleepy morning, probably caught an Uber back to the hostel (I don’t remember), and slept very, very well.
The next morning we gathered ourselves and packed, the hostel halls thick with that gloomy, busy silence that precedes the re-entry to reality. The gap between, “I can’t believe I’m here” and “I can’t believe it’s over” feels its most criminally short in the packing.
Good-byes were brief. I felt especially lucky to have given the speech the night before, for the excuse to say things that I would have struggled to otherwise, to this group that I knew had changed me, even if I didn’t know yet precisely how. Because I lived on the West Coast I’d be on a separate flight with one fellow Angeleno, and a separate car arrived to take us to Narita earlier than the rest. A few hugs and we were gone, and it was really, at that point, done.
— — —
A thing I already knew a lot about then (or at least felt a lot about) was what I called “camp syndrome” (which almost certainly has a real psychological name that isn’t “camp syndrome”). “Camp syndrome” is the emotional hangover of returning to “real life” after a significant time spent living in a different life, in a different place, often with different people and sometimes with different rules; such as at a camp, for example. In my experience it tends to be more intense than a travel hangover—itself related to but not the same as jetlag—the severity of which fluctuates depending on the reason for travel (business or vacation, business being easier) and the people you’re with, and the length of the trip.
I always liked camp, growing up, because it involved the outside—where I liked being—and often sports and outdoorsy activities—which I also liked and was good at—and being around a lot of kids my age, who I typically struggled to connect with unless we were just around each other for extended periods of time. I was never great at introductions or first impressions, and not any better at second or third impressions, but after that I tend to warm up about a degree at a time. At the end of those summer weeks I’d come home tan, stinky, good at something new, brimming with the confidence of recently forged friendships, and emotionally relieved from intense, introspective discussions of faith (nearly all of my camps were church camps). But then I’d be home, and the house would feel so empty, and my friends, despite being inarguably my friends, were hard to talk to when they weren’t right next to me all the time and I could see with my own eyes that they didn’t hate me, and the tan, stink, and confidence would all eventually wash away to reveal that I was still only exactly who I was before. Which wasn't a bad person, or a worse person. Just…less.
Returning from Japan wrapped an intense case of camp syndrome inside an extraordinary travel hangover. There I’d felt confident, respected, even a little important—which is typically the recipe for being an asshole, but those ingredients are so miniscule in my everyday life that I think their increase mostly just balanced me out—and subsequently I felt self-confident, possessing more self-respect, and even a little self-importance. At home I didn’t know what I felt, with all the context of those feelings an ocean away. I was adrift.
A couple things had changed, for certain. I knew I wanted to do something more important with my life—until then my ambitions had been such abstract things as “write for The Economist” and “get into entertainment” (despite majoring in Economics). I’d finally realized that those goals were dreams, fictional destinations lacking a route to reach them. In Japan I had been surrounded by a number of very smart people who I was convinced would go on to do great, important things (and many of whom have), and I’d kept pace with them. So I decided I wanted to make as much of a difference as I thought they would. If I couldn’t keep being the person I was at Japan Camp, I’d try to set up a life that would return me to something like that environment. I didn’t know exactly what I would do or what goal I was aiming for; only that it would Be Important and Make A Difference. I’d discover the details along the way.
Then, at the end of that summer, I moved to New York for an internship and had a not-so-minor nervous breakdown.
I moved three times in six months and yet loved the city. I worked for the NYC Wine & Food Festival, a job that I liked with people I liked, and who even hinted at the possibility of a post-graduate job that I irresponsibly turned down on the spot. I thought I’d find something more Important, and though I liked most of the people in that office I had no respect for the actual leadership, and that more than anything was the dealbreaker. “Respect for leadership” would be a recurring struggle in my career. Laudably naive to expect that people in executive positions should be smarter and more understanding, and not so frequently incompetent trainwrecks.
I had a decent final semester back at college that was far more about the grand finale of my extracurricular musical theater career than it was about my senior thesis. I remember laughing as I left my last class, the anticlimax was so phenomenal. I knew that was the last economics I’d ever really do.
I graduated and moved home and remained unbalanced, shifting from foot to foot, job to job, dream to dream.
I worked freelance and then at my family’s restaurant for a while. Then I got a steady startup marketing job for a few years and was good at it; but I hated telling people that was what I did. Marketing? Was that what I was now? A marketer? That question, and the increasingly toxic office culture, slowly killed that career for me. Then I wrote copy, freelance, for a little bit, and learned to despise it—copy is to writing as a corpse is to a body. I went back to the family restaurant and that was at least a simple, good thing. There I could make a difference; maybe even an Important one. Eventually I started writing—or rather, actually sharing my writing, you know, where people could read it.
And here we are, a long ways from Japan and yet still, obviously, thinking about it. I’ve wondered why.
I began this piece intending to write about one great meal in Japan. Then I realized the greatness of the meal was tied to the context of the trip itself, that it was catharsis in a bowl of noodles. Then I wondered whether the meal was central to the story at all; and interestingly enough, it is. It may be a little sad, but that meal was the last time I felt concrete in life. It was the last time more things seemed to make sense than not, and I knew my place in the world and my goals even abstract as they were, and I really believed they were mine to achieve. Sitting at that counter I was on cliff’s edge and didn’t know it—like an unsuspecting idiot about to make an accidentally Darwinian TikTok—and shortly thereafter I was flailing in freefall, ears full of nothing more than rushing wind. I was changed, not how I thought, and it stuck, not in the way I intended.
I think I wrote this piece now of all times because, dire and aimless as life remains, there’s at least a sense of rebuilding about it. There are specific answers to big questions. There are paths to dreams, twisted but extant. And in the still-rushing wind, a hopeful draft of petrichor, of wet pavement in the dark morning.
— — —
When I think back to that time, I think about how much I didn’t know, and how much I have forgotten since. I regret very little of it, though there are always regrets. It was not perfect, even draped in the warm twilight of memory. But when I find myself wishing I had been better, I think that I could only have been who I was, and even that person wished he was better. He wished too much, if anything.
worth another read, thank you. lived in Tokyo working with Michael Mann for nearly 6 months. ate more Ramen than sushi. still trying to make it the same way, and struggling. shot on series in the same places, one of few productions to shoot in Golden Gai. I love that we have a new connection with Tokyo. thank you for your transparency...