In lieu of holiday anecdotes

My recent visit to Japan was my third.  On all of these three I have made many mental and pen-to-paper notes, with the intention of writing up everything later, and on each occasion I have felt–what?–not so much stymied as muted upon my return.  Increasingly I shy from the conventional “on this day I did this” touring narratives, and yet don’t seem to be able to come up with an alternative.

When it comes to Japan, I think that part of this is something like travellers’ superstition.  I love that place, and hope to be able to continue to return in future, perhaps even with the señor in tow.  These emotions leave me feeling in part that if I say too much about my adventures, I’ll break their spell, that I’ll be able to return to them only in print, rather than in the storehouse of memory.

Another reason is wanting to avoid the commonplaces that so often inform writing about Japan and East Asia more generally: exotic, mysterious, even unknowable.  Many of the things that I love as a visitor I enjoy because they’re so different from my day-to-day life at home: being anonymous, travelling by train, eating little and often (or, on many occasions, a lot and often), seeing art and architecture that’s new to my aesthetic.  It’s hard to mint the vocabulary to account for these in ways that don’t fall wholly into existing patterns, in which I play the foreigner abroad.

My friends in Tokyo-Kanagawa did so much to show me a wonderful time, not least in documenting our sightseeing with their excellent cameras.  Miss Y.’s record of Takeshita Street in Harajuku does much to capture how I feel about my adventure, and indeed the debt I owe her local knowledge in shepherding me around the human density of the place with such confidence.  These images came at the end of an afternoon in Shibuya, Aoyama and Harajuku.

The teenagers and tourists gather in Takeshita Street, late Sunday afternoon.

The author’s chipmunk-like visage appears, smiling in the throng.

Presently, she’s gone.

And, lest I seem completely precious about this, here are some cherry blossoms on the Hakone Mountain trail, and me at the restored Hakone Checkpoint next to a mannequin the Misses Y. declared my new Japanese boyfriend.

Tagged as: Hakone, Harajuku, Japan, travel