An Alien In The Land Of The Rising Sun

Although I have now been living in Japan for over four years, after many visits a year for the five years before, you would have thought that by now I was used to it. In many ways, I don’t give it a second thought, and yet…

Somedays I wake up and wonder where on Earth I am and how did I get here? It feels like at some point in the past I stepped into a coffee bar near where I used to live in the South of Spain and side-slipped into another world on a planet far from home.

I used to get the same thing happening to me after I moved from the UK to Spain. Over there it still happened even after twenty-five years of visiting and ultimately living there. Somebody once said that those moments are called existential ones, or something like that.

The other strange thing that happens when you move to another country is that you become in some small ways one of them. So after a while, a part of me became Spanish. And now here in Japan, small parts of me are becoming Japanese.

In Spain, after becoming fluent in the language, at times I could not remember if I had had a recent conversation with a bilingual Spanish friend in English or Spanish. One other worrying thing was that at times I forgot what things were called in English. For example, I had a client who owned what is called a Meceria in Spanish.

As soon as I entered the shop I knew exactly what it was, and yet for the life of me, I could not remember what it was called in English. I could have looked it up in a dictionary, but I decided to wait to see how long it would take to come back to me. It was three days before the word ‘haberdashery’ popped unprompted into my head. I felt elated by such an achievement of remembering something quite inconsequential.

So here I am, side slipping back into past lives and wondering why everybody in the Uk, suddenly speaks Japanese! Not only that but since when did I start to eat sushi and nato (rotting soy) for breakfast? As for the swamp water that passes for green tea, who in the hell told me to drink that?

Then suddenly the world news comes on the TV and I hear the comforting words of a BBC news presenter speaking my mother tongue. I am almost surprised at how much of the English I understand. Since when did a Japanese guy like me get to learn such great English? It gets worse.

I go to the bathroom to clean my teeth and am shocked at the sight of some seventy-something-year-old guy looking back at me. Now I’m side slipping in time as well as place. It is not helped by a WhatsApp call from my fifty-year-old wife, who looks fifteen years younger than she actually is. How did that happen? How come I got tons older and she got a whole lot younger? And hells bells, since when did my wife decide to have plastic surgery to make herself look Japanese? As if that wasn’t enough, she has even taught herself fluent Japanese!

These days I flit between the UK, Japan and even Spain. My wife only has to serve me some Salmorejo, Jamon Iberico and a glass of Rioja and suddenly I’m Spanish all over again. Fish and chips, and I‘m as English as they come. These days I seem to be quite adept at switching from one culture to another in a heartbeat. It occurred to me that I do the same with my writing life; I go from writing on Medium to Substack to Vocal Media or Beehiiv. They are all the same, but different.

It’s all a far cry from my childhood when I was a snot-nosed, ragged-trousered, undernourished, introvert who was written off as a hopeless case who would never amount to anything. Two university degrees and a host of successful careers later I wish those horrible naysayers were still around, just so I could show them how wrong they were. And the best is yet to come.

For sure there will be more time and place slipping for many years to come. For the moment, however, I am as happy as a sandboy in the land of the rising sun, even though I am not sure which of us is the alien, me or my wife. Matane (See you soon).