Epilogue

Having been back from Japan for a week I was wandering around Goodge Street in London before meeting an old friend.

I was reminded of all my wanderings around Japanese cities in the weeks before, but in London the wandering was a depressing experience; something about the grey sky and the miserable looking people having conversations I’d prefer not to understand.

Something about being finally back too. I was missing people, places, a whole life built up and then torn down until there was nothing left but a set of passport stamps, some souvenirs and a mass of stagnant memories.

But in a shopping centre off Oxford Street I found something akin to a ray of light.

It was Uni Qlo, a Japanese clothes shop that I had been to frequently in Tokyo and which only recently opened stores in London. The sign outside was written in English and in Katakana, identical to its appearance in Japan.

I went inside feeling reverse culture shock, the culture I had left being recreated in my home country. The layout was the same, the clothes seemed identical but it all felt profoundly odd. I could stare at a rack of clothes and imagine I was still in Japan, but it just wasn’t the same because I felt different.

The shop assistants appeared to be Japanese to me and I hovered around one of them as they spoke to a customer. His English had the right kind of tinge to it and I wanted to start a conversation in Japanese.

There were different ways of going about this: just say hello in Japanese and see what happened, ask a question about clothes in English and then slip into Japanese, ask them if they were Japanese etc.

Excuse me
Yes
Are you Japanese?

I said this to a female shop assistant folding T-shirts. She nodded and I greeted her in Japanese. She was slightly taken aback but replied in turn. I tried to say that this was the first time I had been to a Uni Qlo in England, and was finding it strange. She clapped twice and smiled saying that my Japanese was good, in the classic way all Japanese people do no matter how awfully you speak their language.

Once we switched to Japanese I felt myself change. My voice became higher in pitch, I began to smile more and feel enthusiastic. She too seemed to be enjoying the conversation and was incredibly friendly. We talked about England and Japan, everything not to do with clothes, I’ve never had a conversation with a shop assistant that was so casual, it may have seemed almost inappropriate in a shared mother tongue. She asked me my name and told me hers, though we were strangers there was suddenly a connection.

She asked me if I wanted to carry on learning Japanese and I said yes but that it was hard because there are not that many Japanese people in England. “There so are,” she said, “there’s a Japanese community in London.”

However, I don’t live in London, I live in a tiny village in Gloucestershire which Japanese explorers have probably still not gotten around to discovering yet. I asked her about the Uni Qlo stores, whether they always employ Japanese people and she said, “Yes, about 30%.” So there was my solution for Japanese practice; I could just find my nearest Uni Qlo, sidle up casually to a shop assistant and use the old, “Excuse me, are you Japanese” line.

A supervisor of hers was walking past and she started folding clothes again. Even though he probably didn’t know what we were talking about he could tell it was not about the clothes. He asked her a question about something, but I think the real meaning was, “Please get back to work.” I took the hint too and said goodbye, she told me to come back again soon.

I walked away smiling.

Being English in Japan is an experience I am familiar with, but being English in England having been to Japan is suddenly new and exciting. Cultures and language are no longer constrained by oceans and borders and in a city as multi-cultural as London I am finding new places and people that I wouldn’t have noticed before.

My grey mood lifted and I began to look around me in a new light. Suddenly I saw Japanese restaurants, Wasabi noodle bars, Samurai sushi shops, Mitsukoshi Department stores etc.

I went to a shop selling bento boxes and sushi. Inside they had onigiri, my staple food during my trip. For the first time in my life I was finally able to understand all of the different flavours, but admittedly at the cost of them being twice the price and half as good.

It is hard to avoid the feeling of loss when leaving a life behind, but that doesn’t have to be the way it is. I have the feeling now that my life in Japan doesn’t have to be dead and gone but can continue in certain ways that I am yet to discover.

But in this paragraph lies the end of this blog. It began two years ago with “So it all began on the 27th of March when I woke up at 4:15AM remembering that I had something to do today.” And now back from my long travels, older, wiser, more bilingual, I wonder what I’ll do tomorrow.