I have been missing Japan like mad lately, so this post takes a temporary detour from nature and the gardening life into the contours of my other spiritual home.

I fell in love with Japan at the age of seven. You rarely recover from an intense childhood crush. I had found my mom’s old high school geography textbook in the back of a closet and it had fallen open, almost magically, to the map of Japan. I remember no other page in the book, only that map. I stared at it while laying in bed at night, whispering the names of Japan’s main islands to myself while I traced their coasts from north to south and back again with the tip of my finger. There were no other pictures on that page, and I did not fall in love with samurais or geisha girls or any kind of orientalist rubbish, but with a serrated, hooked crescent floating in a grey sea.

Later, as I studied Japanese art and language in college and took a few trips to Japan before eventually living in Tokyo for two years, the real place fit the shape that had been carved out in my heart as a child. Longing and fulfillment aligned, like a soft plum resting on a gently curved palm. In spite of the earthquakes and tropical storms, the crowded rush hour subways and awkward instances of linguistic inadequacy, Japan made me feel, above all, safe.
I am not thinking here of the country’s low crime rate and social cohesion— though the fact that I could walk around Tokyo in the middle of the night, alone, without fear, or leave my bicycle untethered while shopping, made for a pleasant daily life— but because of a shared sense of reverence for beauty, order, quiet. In conversations, shared silence mattered as much as words. In stores, impossibly elaborate wrappings were given as much attention and care as the things they were meant to briefly wrap. During the spring office picnic under the cherry trees, soft pink petals fluttered onto suits, hair, and cups. The shishi-odoshi would strike the stone and fill the air with its ring again, but not yet, not yet. The accumulation of these many small stretches in time and space in which nothing mattered but a shared appreciation for the present, built in me a sense of existential safety. Life could end in an instant, yet wasn’t it perfect, just now?

It’s not that there is nothing vulgar in Japan— loud pachinko parlors, drunken salarymen, the misogyny of the hyper-busty manga vixen— Still, on the whole, I felt my safest there, and haven’t in the same way since. To miss Japan is to miss the place where, even as a never-quite-understanding foreigner, I could bow my head in acknowledgement of life’s transient beauty, and somehow, finally, belong.