This is my 20th year in Japan, and next year it’ll be my 21st, which will be half my life.
While this is the case, it will only be the first year where I have been in Japan half my life, and the 42 years beforehand I will have been in Canada more than I have been in Japan.
In 2005 when I came, the plan was to stay for one year. A person in my training group in the English conversation company I came over for said he was here for life to meet a wife, as Australian life wasn’t for him. I thought he was the biggest loser in the world at 21, but now I admire his clarity (assuming he was not a shitty person). Hopefully he and a wife he met here and perhaps their kids are all happy.
When friends left Japan after their year teaching English, it was always a little sad, but that was the gig, it was something temporary. I didn’t think that I would be here for another 19 years, I thought that it would be my time to go home in another six months, or perhaps a year or to.
One of my best friends left after eight years in Japan, in 2012 (he came in 2004). Eight years seemed like an eternity to us. Could you even return home after that long? He wasn’t happy in Japan, and it was good that he left I think. I think he has gone on to find a life in a place he truly loves.
Last week, I learned a friend of mine would be going home to America in a month or two. I say friend, but we have really only met three or four times. He was a gaming friend. I have two types of gaming friends. The first group is people who enjoy talking about games, going to Akihabara to look at games together, enjoy gaming events, and potentially work in the gaming industry. The second group is people I play games with. This friend was in the second group. In this group, friends have amazing setups with most retro gaming consoles, with the best setups to play them. We play Kururin, Chu Chu Rocket, or Monkey Ball or maybe Rock N Roll Racing.
Since I found out my wife was pregnant last September, I haven’t met him, so it’s been just about a year. Apparently he was planning on moving back for a few months now, but as I never came out anymore, I didn’t know. Now, after 20 years, it feels like he just came here, and I can hardly imagine moving away now. I don’t think he has any unhealthy disdain for Japan, but he has realized that it is not the country for him to live in, and he is taking action to remedy that.
A thought I can’t properly infuse in this is that I am now centered around Tokyo, and for the first 12 years of life in Japan, I was centered in Chiba. If I went out for drinks, it would be somewhere in Chiba, and I wouldn’t care to go to Tokyo. Now, despite living in Saitama, my friends were mainly met online, and we are scattered across the greater Tokyo area, making Tokyo the obvious place to meet. Chiba feels more small and close-knit. Tokyo is big and ever growing. It can change how community is viewed.
When I lived in Kimitsu in the south of Chiba in 2005 and saw another Westerner, I would be happy to see a potential friend. Now, working in Ebisu in 2025, I see hundreds of Westerners a day and think nothing of it.
This somehow influences what I am trying to talk about.
I’m not 100% what I’m trying to talk about though.
I don’t feel like I’m left though. I am not leaving, but I am not left.
(The title is from the Weakerthans song “Left and Leaving”, which I heartily recommend you listen to if you like folksy poetic ditties.)
Klingsor's First Winter 