May 7th, 2019
Winnipeg -> International Airspace
My flight leaves at 5:25 pm.
I stand on the precipice; the edge between anticipation and actualization. For months I have been laying a groundwork of plans for this trip to Japan, after years of it being a dream.
But why Japan? Why choose it as a destination over all the other places that could pull one's attention? It stems from seeds of curiosity towards a culture with core values of respect and mastery, and what that can look like in a modernizing world. How can we honour and protect traditions as we move forward with excitement into the future? From what I have been able to glean from afar, Japan embodies this with its fast moves into the future and deep roots coexisting in its own unique way. And as a recovering computer scientist (read: one seeking balance), this is something I want to both witness and learn to better embody.
When I was younger I booked flights based on cost and opportunity, opting for more physically demanding choices while I figured I had the physical ability to do so. Other destinations could wait.
But they don't wait. What I didn't realize in my 20s (amongst many other things) is that it isn't just my body that would shift over the years, but so too the destinations around the world. By earthquake, tsunami, or globalization, land and culture are shifting quickly. Putting off a decision for now might mean putting it off forever.
And so I go.
I've crafted a circular route that will begin and end in Tokyo. From the megacity I will catch a train west to Nakatsagawa, walk north through the Kiso Valley for a week to Matsumoto, train up to the Fukui region to spend a day at Eihei-ji temple, explore the Sabae countryside before following the rails onward to the busy city of Kyoto, and then resting in the Yoshino Valley on a meandering route back to Tokyo.
It's a rough plan, with a few orienting destinations but also plenty of space to make room for serendipity, weather, and any ailments that might rear their ugly heads along the way. Beyond preparations, I know there is so much that I can't begin to expect and it is important to make room for that. Accepting this and finding a flow with the happenings of life and lives lived is one of the beautiful things of traveling - an aspect that's harder to cultivate at home where walking is of the same repeated routes day after day.
While I'm mostly beyond the "what if I forget...
It has been a while since I've steeped myself in another language, and Japanese is one that I have a healthy wariness around.
I’ll be going pretty rural at parts in Japan, and navigating language and wayfinding amidst it is going to be interesting. My roots in Latin scripts are great for learning languages with familiar alphabets on the fly (English, French, Spanish - no problem). Written Japanese, on the other hand, has no familiar hooks for me to find a starting point to grapple with.
Add to the challenge the fact that it is a tonal language which I assuredly don't have an ear for. An alternate inflection can mean a drastic difference in meaning - hilarious as a story after the fact, but a headache when running out of daylight and trying to find your way through the countryside to a bed with my name on it.
And so I've been studying the spoken basics and cultural etiquette. Between the two, I hope that body language can help close any other language gaps, as it has been my universal fallback so many times before.
But first, we fly.
D