The trip of a lifetime! I had the privilege to visit Japan with my family this summer. We went for 14 days but it felt like such a short visit given everything we wanted to do and actually did.
Why Japan?
Because I haven’t returned in almost 30 years. Having lived there at 17, the life I experienced then was at an entirely different time. That the time before cell phones and digital prevalence in every walk of life, the time when the internet was only just gearing its head without yet having made its presence felt, not in India and not in Japan. It was a time when we wrote letters to communicate – writing letters was my coping mechanism in fighting homesickness because Japan was indeed the first place I had lived outside of India and without my family. Writing letters was therapeutic on an entirely different level that I cannot imagine it to be at present time. Writing letters was my way to process all that was happening to me and with me in my one year in Osaka.
The forgotten art of letter writing is a loss with which this generation will never quite empathize because they do no understand the yearning for a letter, the looking forward to mail everyday to see if there is something in the mailbox for you, the worrying about the weight of the envelope and its contents and wondering if it would make it to its destination in good condition. I used special onion thin paper and I wrote a pages after pages to stuff in envelopes literally everyday. I learned Japanese and was fluent by the time I left but I had no one to speak to in my native language except for the time, like clockwork, my family called, every 15 days. It must’ve cost them a lot of money but those few moments I got to connect with my loved ones meant the world to me. Sometimes, I would buy a calling card and call them from a pay phone for conversations that barely lasted 2-3 minutes but those precious minutes were enough to give me fuel to go for the next few weeks.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t always homesick or depressed. On the contrary, I loved my life there, with all its adventures and while I wouldn’t want to be left out in the snow on purpose ever again, it’s all par for the course. What do they say about things that don’t kill you….I had some of the most caring host parents, the best teachers, and the coolest and kindest friends. Tomoyo, Sachiko, and Harumi made my life a thousand fold exciting, and fun because of their generous giving of friendship. We maintained communication via letters for a while upon my return to India but slowly lost touch.
This time in Osaka, I was immensely fortunate to have gotten to see my first host mom and sister but I would be remiss not to mention that I wished I was in touch with my friends from my teenage years and gotten a chance to reconnect with them as well.
| This is part of a series of posts I plan to write about my experiences in Japan. Post 1 is about returning to Japan and letter-writing. |
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