As the title of this series suggests, I’m on a 50-day long trip to Japan. Not that I counted the days when booking my flights. It just turned out to be a nice, satisfying round number — nice enough to make it into the title.
I like to consider myself a seasoned traveler. Not a nomad — nowhere even close — but the kind that’s up for a getaway every other month and, one way or the other, has been to 48 cities in 11 different countries in the past year and a half alone. A lot of these trips turn out to be solo travels, and Japan — one that I’d been longing to go on for months — was supposed to be the same. There’s just something about the hype of the country, though, that allured various family members to join, albeit at different times throughout, and it became a disjointed sort of family holiday. It’s far too early to bore you with the logistical details this early on though; you’ll find out everything that becomes relevant as you begin reading through this… journal? memoir? For lack of a better word, ‘account’. Yes, that sounds about right.
I’m accustomed to documenting most of my travel stories on an Instagram travel account I have dedicated for this purpose. I’ve done it without fail for every trip I’ve taken over the past year and a half. But, knowing that people that I know are seeing everything I share in real time, I tend to mask some realities, packaging my experiences into bundles of content that please the audience. The fact that it’s a public account also means that there’s people I don’t know seeing what I post too, and often a lot of the details that are significant in my head are things that I’d consider irrelevant and oversharing for the broader public, and I end up sharing more of a ‘what-I-did’ account than a ‘what-it-meant’. For whatever reason, the version of events that social media sees is often far from the whole truth.
One could argue that it’s a good — debatably, better — thing to re-live only the good when looking back on these trips. But I had high hopes for this particular one and it became evident from the offset that this trip was going to be much deeper. I wanted it to be much more. And it would be a disservice to the trip and also the version of me while I was on the trip to only remember the highlights.
I’ve been to the country once before, 7 years ago. It was when my brother Onkar was starting his bachelor degree at the University of Tokyo, and my parents, uncle and I had flown out to get him settled in. I wasn’t so young — older than my 14 year old cousin Eva (who also accompanied us for a part) was this time around — yet somehow I have very limited recollection of the entire experience. I remember the main things we did broadly to quite some extent, but the details? How I felt? How the family dynamics were? Nada.
I even remember having kept a diary for the first couple of days of the trip at the time. It’s lying somewhere near the bottom of my souvenir drawer in my old room back home in India. A couple of pages filled with tales of my 15 year old self’s anxiety around earthquakes and chances of making it back home alive as I sat at the airport during the journey there. The rest bare in anticipation of being filled, but the hopes being gradually shattered as time passed up to a point where my memory became unable to serve it. I wish I’d kept it up. It could’ve been a treasure chest of memories. The way my uncle speaks (correction: gushes) about that trip makes me envy his version of events, even though I was quite literally right there with him. I experienced it all too, and had I preserved it, I would’ve been able to keep it that way. This is the kind of regret I was determined not to have this time around.
And so I decided that, alongside my usual Instagram stories, for my own eyes at least, I would maintain a truthful account of my experiences. One that I wouldn’t put myself under the pressure of sharing right away, so that I could freely include all the ugly. This way, even if I did decide to share at a later point in time, I’d grant myself the choice of what to omit from a record of the whole, unaltered experience, that would at least exist, should I want to revisit it.
The fact that I tasked myself with writing something notable each day made me feel things deeper, in a way.
I wanted to be more in touch with my feelings this time, and the decision to write served that purpose well. This and this book is, in turn, to a large extent, a personal memo so that I can fully relive the most vividly detailed version of my time and experience in Japan, whenever I so wish.
That being said, it is by no means a play-by-play of the events of the trip. That would be no better than the aforementioned Instagram stories. I am not a stranger to myself, and I don’t want to treat future me as one. Not to mention, it would make this entire text rather boring. I wouldn’t even re-read it myself, let alone consider that any of you would.
Instead, I’ve picked one highlight of each day to talk about — whether an event, or a train of thought that an event led me down or my feelings around what happened, or even the impact that the day had on my life as a whole, and the things I took away from it.
Some entries go into much more detail than others — depending on how much time I had to write, what space I was in mentally, and how strongly the day’s experiences landed with me. It’s not uniform. It’s not perfect. But it’s honest.
Writing has been my preferred format from very early on, as you’ll discover, and after maintaining a daily journal of the early days, I actively decided to adopt a sleep-on-it policy. I say ‘actively’ because I admit that the habit began out of obligation — lack of time (the first few days were so packed I would fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow — a luxury superpower I hadn’t experienced in years, and that I’d been jealous of those around me for possessing) and admitted procrastination. I would make sure to jot down everything I deemed worthy of remembering in the moment itself (Apple Notes got the real-time feed) but I would only properly sit down and consolidate it into a coherent flow of thoughts the next day.
Soon though, I realized that while emotions are always strongest in the moment that you feel them, they’re also the most biased. The heat of the moment is real. One could argue that waiting to form a retrospective opinion could be considered tampering with the truth. But, given that I noticed this early on, I paid extra special attention not to consider any changes in opinion caused by events later than the day being talked about, ensuring that the day’s account was true to myself at the end of the day in question. This measure sufficed in making sure I didn’t stray from the truth, but given that my words concern not just my own image but also that of the family members who’ve accompanied me, it was a measure taken in everyone’s best interests. After all, I can get so worked up and frustrated about something one day and realise the next that it wasn’t such a big deal after all. I can be that way about the people around me too, and the last thing I want to do here is defame someone because of my own, subjective, in-the-moment perception of something they did without giving even myself the chance to reevaluate the situation.
So take it with a pinch of salt that while the ideas for each day’s entry are noted down in real-time, they’ve been elaborated on a little later, after having the chance to reconsider, rarely change but sometimes mellow, my opinions. Don’t worry — I haven’t left out describing any hard feelings that I still had after a day or two of mulling. You’ll find plenty of drama, not for the sake of drama but from what it meant inside the bigger picture and how I grew from it. You’ll find plenty of fun too, because a trip without that would be a sad trip indeed, and Japan was far, far, far from a sad trip. In any case, please read this account on the premise that these are my almost unfiltered thoughts in real-time as the events described are happening.
Come, live in Japan for 50 days with me.