Japan

Despite a little bit of anxiety about organising a taxi for the early hours of the morning, we managed to get out of Russia and on our way to Japan. Two flights, one to Frankfurt then one to Osaka. The check-in staff at St Petersburg badly misinterpreted our request to have seats between us on the trip to Osaka by putting seats, and the aisle, between us on the flight to Frankfurt, but filling those seats with other passengers, and then actually putting no seats between us on the flight to Osaka. But the agonising seven hour wait at terrible, terrible Frankfurt airport with a restless toddler made the flights seems positively relaxing.

We arrived at Kansai International exhausted, unwashed and laden down with too much luggage. Pretty miserable in other words. But stepping out the doors at immigration, we were suddenly back in Japan. It was an amazing, uplifting, Proustian experience. It was like being transported back five years to the very point in time when we had left Japan. (And slightly shifted in space, because we left Japan from the 3rd floor of Kansai airport, but now we were on the ground floor.) So much came flooding back in the instant that we stepped through the doors, and even more on the one-hour train trip into town.

We had arranged to stay with our friend Richie, who had lived in a neighbouring town when we lived in the Japanese countryside. He had since moved rather closer to Osaka, to a place called Sasayama. Unfortunately he wasn't going to be available until he finished work, some 9 hours after we landed. This situation left us with two possibilities, heading up to his place and waiting for him or killing time in Osaka. The problem with the second option was that we had far too much luggage to cart around Osaka. The problem with the first was that we really, really wanted to revisit out old haunts without delay. Luckily, the baggage lockers at Osaka station are huge and we were able to fit everything in one, leaving us unladen and free to explore the city.

Without really consciously deciding where to go, we wandered down to Namba, the centre of the area where we used to live:
"Subway?"
"Sure. Which stop? Namba?"
"I guess so, yeah."
We then got lost in the Namba Walk underground shopping maze. But while searching for a toilet we stumbled across the basement entrance to Muji. It was as if some strange force was attracting us there. So naturally we had to buy ourselves some clothes and stationary.

Finally the time came for us to head up to Richie's. We managed to get the right train and we met him when he got on at Fukuchiyama. We talked all the way to his place.

Richie is still living with Hiro. They have a small house together, in a little enclave with Hiro's parents and brother and sister-in-law. As with his place in Yoka, they have set up their house up really well, with lots of character and innovative variations on traditional Japanese design. The photo I have added gives a little sense of this but without doing it justice.

Over the next couple of days we managed to re-discover a tiny bit of Osaka. It had changed very little in the years we had been away. It occurred to me when we were looking for a new camera in the giant electronics store Yodobashi that they had been playing their annoying jingle over the loudspeakers every single day while we were away. We felt very familiar with the place as well. Except at one point, when we walked through to Dotonbori street. Dotonbori was one of our main thoroughfares when we lived in Osaka and we would walk down it several times a week. However, going back to it after several years was like encountering it for the first time, with the disorientating confusion of sights and sounds making our heads spin. We did manage to get a snap of the Kuidaore Taro clown though.

We also managed to meet up with heaps of our friends. Horace was still in Japan and we caught up with him over dinner. (He's back to the States later this year to do his law studies at last.) Kevin and Jenny are also still in Japan, and we stayed with them for a couple of nights, sitting up until late talking about old times. We were also lucky to be able to fit in a short trip back to Hidaka to meet up with some our old friends from there, Shinobu, Masako and Setsuko. It was just the briefest of trips however, barely overnight. In fact our whole visit to Japan was far, far to short. Almost serving merely to remind us what we had left behind.

So it was very sad to leave Japan, and sad also that our holiday had to come to an end. But after three weeks I was close to exhaustion, physically and mentally. I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed, getting away from the travails of travelling and getting Bucky back into his routines.