Japan Day Seventeen : Coming home....

The last day began quite early as I needed to get up and pack up my stuff. With mine and Woo’s stuff all over the place, the hotel room looked like an earthquake had hit it. After breakfast I started the pack up and we were out of the hotel and waiting for our bus to Nagano by 9am.

We did have plans to go see the Zenkoji temple in Nagano, but it was snowing and all the streets were covered in slush. We hence decided to catch an earlier shinkansen into Tokyo and put our stuff in a locker and look around.

I slept most of the way from Nagano to Tokyo, so the trip went very quickly. When we got to Tokyo we went searching for the lockers. Unfortunately there were no lockers free that would fit our bags, so we paid 2500yen to leave them in a cloak room.

We jumped a train to Akihabra and searched for a few trinkets and other things that will remind us of Japan. Woo bought himself a Bumblebee transformer, which he was very pleased with. I bought a bobble head ninja for my desk at work.

We stopped for a coffee near the Tokyo station after we had returned from Akihabra. Woo decided he wanted to play with his Bumblebee. This is a toy that says on the box “ages 5 and up” and Woo was struggling just to be able to get the packaging open. He then followed the instructional diagram slowly and eventually had a transformed the Camaro into a robot. He then set about changing it back to a car, this would prove more difficult.

As I sat there and watched Woo fumble with a toy for five year olds, I thought about what I will miss about Japan. There has been so much that has happened over the past two and a half weeks that I barely know where to start.

I will miss the legs. Japanese girls have the best pins, hands down. It’s the middle of winter and they are wearing little skirts and stockings. Dear God, I will miss the legs.

I will miss the way everything just works. The transport especially, is unbelievably good. Even though there is an obvious language barrier, Woo and I were able to get whatever we needed, from change for the Laundromat, to changing our shinkansen tickets to an earlier train. We visited places that were not exactly set up for foreigners, and we thought we were gonna be screwed, but every single person we asked was always happy to help.

I will miss the service. I can’t understand them, and most of the time they can’t understand me. However, I have always been greeted with a smile, and that smile does not turn into a scowl when they realise I can’t speak Japanese. Throughout this trip, we have always been treated like we are the most important people in the room. Something that is severely lacking in the service one receives in Perth.

I will miss the soundtrack. This is really hard to explain, but Japan has its own soundtrack. This soundtrack is mostly a cacophony of sounds, assaulting your brain as Rambo would a Burmese concentration camp. On a walk through a tech store, the equivalent of a Rick Hart for example, and you will find Japanese employees standing on ladders, screaming at you through megaphones. Walk around any shopping district and you will be yelled at. Even though I am pretty sure they know I can’t understand them, they still yell. Walk into a Pub or restaurant, and in most places all the staff will scream “Hajimemashite”, which roughly means “pleased to meet you”. Rather than a beeping at the pedestrian crossing, there will be a little musical flourish to let you know it’s time to cross the street. Another little musical flourish at the train stations will let you know to stand clear, as the doors are closing.

I will miss the randomness. I cannot possibly put into words how truly random this pace is. It is like nothing you can imagine. Woo and I have totally worn out the words “that’s so random”. We have totally worn out the words “brain explosion” or “atama ga bakuhatsu”. There were even sometimes where things were so weird that all we could do was look at each other and laugh. They have strange cartoon characters everywhere, both for community announcements and for advertising. They have muscle bound cartoon men as Pachinko parlour mascots. Pachinko itself is a random ass combination of pokies, pinball and arcade video games.

After forty five minutes, Woo had returned Bumblebee to a Camaro. We then went and grabbed our bags and got on the shuttle out to Narita Airport.

I sat on the train, Woo reading my book which he has become addicted to over the past few days. Looking out the window I am very sad to be leaving Japan, more so than anywhere I have been before it. Unfortunately I am not as well travelled as, well, anyone I know really, but this place has changed me. I held my fingers to the glass on the train, trying to somehow tell the country itself what an amazing experience I have had, and how grateful I am for it. To let Japan know that I love her. To let her know that she has far exceeded all my expectations and then some.

I know I’m being much more flowery in my writing in this last entry of the blog. This is because I have come to a few realisations about my life and plans that I had regarding it, and assumptions I had made of the people who would be involved with it. Both related to the trip, and completely unrelated. It is also that while I am sad to be leaving Japan, I am ready and happy to be returning to Australia. Partially for all the obvious reasons such as sleeping in my own bed, with my own pillow (every pillow I had in Japan was awful) and being able to go down to the shops and not feel like a gimp because I can’t speak the language. I look forward to fitting in, well as much as I normally do anyway.

I started missing Australia when we were snowboarding. We’d spent so long avoiding Gaijin, that when we were forced to hang out with Aussies again, we resisted a little. Aussies are awesome. Yes, sometimes we may drink too much, sometimes we may get rowdy, we may even have four grown men playing stacks on in a hotel room. However we are a fun and friendly nation of travellers. Woo and I pretty much had dinner or drinks with a different bunch of people every evening while we were in Hakuba. All of them lovely. It was quite a relief to actually be able to converse with people other than Woo. No offense to him, as we have got along better than either of us imagined, but I need people around me. I miss my friends and I look forward to seeing them all again soon.

We got to the airport and checked in. I flirted with the possibility of dropping two grand on a new tiny laptop, but decided against it. Japan would be awesomely cheap if the exchange rate wasn’t so awful, so I decided to get it in Australia, as talk them down to a better price. We had our last meal in Japan at the airport and a farewell Sapporo draught. We then boarded the plane and said our final farewell to this fantastic country.

Japan. It hits you in the mind.