And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see

Reporting in from Tokyo! For those of you I might not have told directly: I’m a visiting student at the University of Tokyo this summer, and will be here until the end of September. I may have expressed to some of you, while I was preparing to move for the summer, that I would be fine when I actually got to Japan, but mid-packing hell, I wished that I had never signed myself up for this in the first place. As a note to my grumpy past self from my present self, and as a reminder to my future self: I was fine once I got here. Great, even!

Today, I was mildly jumpscared by the fact that I’ve already been here two weeks. I have a vague sense of routine, although exercise still needs to be cycled in somewhere. My labmates are mostly from various parts of East Asia, and are 90% men, which is a dynamic I have grown unused to, but they are nice and a few have similar hobbies. In true Nisha fashion, I already managed to suggest karaoke as a lab activity on a random Wednesday night. I am convinced that people who speak tone-based languages are much less tone-deaf than Americans, and that every Chinese song ever written is a sad ballad about love. The food is to die for, although I have to keep reminding myself not to eat out too much. I’ve been to Sushiro three times in nine days and was heartbroken to discover that my favorite melon cream pan from FamilyMart has FORTY grams of sugar. I had a vague goal of making at least one new non-work friend, and Katie (my roommate, who is sadly leaving me to join some of you in NYC) ticked this off for me by introducing me to a local friend. I had a lovely time running a lap around the Imperial Palace with her and some of her friends.

(A sidenote that has been living rent-free in my brain: At post-run dinner, one of said friends - born and raised in Japan - was surprised when we told her that the reason so many white men are in Japan is yellow fever. We need some sort of public safety initiative for Japanese women about this.)

Nearly every day, mostly when I’m walking back to my apartment, I find myself upon almost the exact same train of thought, which goes something like this: Man, I will really look back fondly on my summer in Tokyo in a few years. I wasn’t sure what to call this feeling. The Gemini AI summary labeled it anticipatory nostalgia, and some clever person in a blog called it nowstalgia, which I’m going to steal.

It is sort of stupid to already be bracing for future feelings of wistful nostalgia as I am actively living my life. I’m not sure if this is just a base feature of the developed prefrontal cortex, or if it was COVID that made me like this. Getting the rug pulled out from under me w.r.t. my college experience, and how I didn’t know that it would be gone until it was, makes me incredibly conscious of how I really should be counting every beautiful thing I can see. Obviously, this is not a great way to enjoy the current moment. Today, due to the combination of rainy season and typhoon making the weather outside quite gross, I spent all day wondering if I should go outside and face the weather or feel like I wasted a precious weekend day rotting inside. I chose the latter, and proceeded to feel bad about it.

I don’t have a conclusion to this train of thought other than the vague feeling that I should not necessarily be trying to optimize every second of my time in Japan. Tokyo is one of those cities that you could probably live in all your life and not experience all of. What I think I’m going to do is make a bucket list and try to check it off over the summer. Hopefully said bucket list will be upcoming in the next post.

This post admittedly originated from my desire to feel like I did something with my day that wasn’t have insane writer’s block on the introduction of my paper or play three hours of Hades. If you do have helpful words for me, I would love to hear it.

Anyways, thanks for reading this meandering and narrative structure-less post. In exchange, here are a bunch of pictures from my first two weeks here.