My Spirit Wants a Forest to Wander In: Japan 2018

How the hell do you tackle Japan?

I started with this question and no definite answers. After 7 days in Tokyo, I still have no definite answers.

As a writer I write characters to be agents of their story, to drive the events in a plot.  But at a certain point, I've learned in my travels, your experience has to be driven by where you are. As much as I love building itineraries and creating narratives I have to let my trip adapt and change what I do.

Japan forced me to reckon with the constraints of my itinerary more than any country. Most folks who dream of Japan have a vision of Japan already set by "Cool Japan" pop culture such as anime and manga. We dream of the Japanese sushi every travel guide devours on Travel Channel shows or we dream of a city built in what we conceive as the future because of Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell. I'll confess that I wanted to see a Japan I saw in the chambara films I loved in high school.

Each ward and neighborhood in Tokyo, however, contains a multitude of threads that during my journey I felt compelled to pull. Pulling these new threads led me down my favorite paths and towards my favorite moments in Japan.

Tackling Japan

Initially I planned a Tokyo plus Kyoto trip itinerary, but with 7 days in Japan I realized this plan would not serve me well. In Hong Kong, I initially planned to balance my experience with a side trip to a  more historical or natural adjacent destination (in China or Vietnam) but opted against this idea to my benefit. Instead, Hong Kong held plenty of landscapes, traditional culture, but a contemporary life worth experiencing. I decided to follow this template to tackle Japan by staying exclusively in the Tokyo area.

I booked one day trip for myself to Nikko National Park, however. Nikko National Park has a reputation for beautiful scenery near mountains, an active volcano, and the park hosts the tomb of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate that preceded Japan's modernization during the Meiji Restoration. 

Any hesitation I had for an exclusively Tokyo home base left me after I lucked out on a hotel in Akasaka. Ultimately I found Minato, the ward of Tokyo I stayed in, and Akasaka, the district within this ward, convenient yet peaceful. Akasaka served as the ideal place to find inspiration in Tokyo and Japan.

Apparitions of Tokyo

Tokyo is a city that I look back with memories that seem to be apparitions. I would start my day with a purpose or destination and on my way find new threads to pull on that I pursued. Consequently, Tokyo left me with stray moments that feel so slight yet were magical in totality. These moments include:

• EVERYONE CROSSING AT SHIBUYA CROSSING AND RUNNING INTO EACH OTHER BUT STILL IN AN ORDERLY FASHION
• takoyaki balls with the dark but sweet sauce (and not mayonnaise -- my request)
• Metro train rides on the weekdays with men in business suits quietly balancing reading amidst a frenzy of people closing in
• Taking shoes off to step into Nikko Tosho-gu as I listen to the tour guide speak in my headset
• matcha ice cream
• 7 story department stores with the basement floor selling $25 USD cantaloupes for Mother's Day
• a fisherman's lone boat on Lake Chunzenji
• cherry blossom stragglers on trees near Kegon Falls
• a rotation of short films by Kondoh Akino exhibiting at Mori Art Museum
• people staking their place at the Tokyo City View at Roppongi Hills, lounging for the sunset view of Minato and the horizon below us
• ROBOTS!!! (specifically Asimo at Miraikan)
• placing my feet onto the hard rocks underneath the ocean at Odaiba Seaside Park, as locals relish their final Golden Week day in the sun
• Koinobori streaming in the wind before Children's Day near 21_21 Design Sight Museum
• Otaku geeking out over the endless floors of manga in Akihabara
• ANDROIDS!!! (also at Miraikan)
• a bondage lesson in the back of a Shinjuku gallery exhibiting photography depicting bondage
• print screens of pines in the mist and wind from the 16th century (by Tohaku)
• Bamboo trees peeking out at Zojo-ji
• the hidden forest below Tokyo Tower
• a Teppanyaki chef meticulously cutting sweet potatoes and Kobe beef
• well dressed hosts at my hotel's breakfast buffet with a "Good Morning" ready to-go as I spent every morning with coffee, croissants, and burdock root
• Takahasi Korekiyo Memorial Park sliced out on the way from my hotel to Aoyama Station -- my go-to refuge for a coffee and an audiobook

I found Tokyo best suits the photo-collages by Sohei Nishino, whose work I found at 21_21 Design Sight.  I felt he captured what I love of a place like Tokyo or other places I've been -- the dynamic individual experiences at play. Tokyo, like the individual component images collected in Nishino's collages, possesses a vast compilation of individual moments and experiences that were transcendent in their totality.

Shinto Shrines and Buddhist Temples

While I relished the individual components of the Tokyo I traveled through, I pulled a new thread that I continued to pull elsewhere in the city: Shinto shrines. I found the most transcendent moments I had in Tokyo through this thread on my journey.

Shintoism describes a way of life more than a religion. Shintoism is about communicating with unseen forces and spirits, kami, that exist in everything. I worry I am oversimplifying Shintoism so I encourage you to read more.

When I conceived of my Japan trip I knew that temples and shrines would serve a major part in connecting me with a timeless if not traditional element of the country. I didn't initially conceive of how Shinto shrines defined a peace in me. After talking with friends I've found this new peace difficult to describe, but I'll try.

See, I am not spiritual and certainly not religious. I'm not a militant atheist -- I use the term agnostic to describe myself. I simply do not know how to measure what is not in front me, so to speak. I take no peace in this belief but it best represents what I believe is the truth -- that I don't know.

If anything rattles me, it's uncertainty, and if anything scares me it's uncertainty of what happens after...I'm gone.

Sometimes I think of death or I think of life post-death which is no life. Just a scare -- a car merging when it shouldn't, a turbulent plane that had to land in Edmonton because of cold winds in Calgary -- cascades my thoughts down a dark rabbit hole.

I do not want to die.

Granted, most folks share this fear and we do the same thing -- we carry on with our lives and try to do the best we can to be decent people. Eventually my depressing cascade tumbles with new, more positive thoughts. But underneath my optimism and a lust for life lies a shattering anxiety over death.

I describe my fear because in Japan I found myself in Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples with affiliated shrines like Zojo-ji, Nikko, or Sengaku-ji. These shrines provided a new sense peace in regards to my fear of death.

In particular, my first shrine -- the Meiji Shrine -- introduced what I found a powerful concept. The government erected this shrine prior to WWII (and rebuilt it after) as a way of communicating with the Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. The shrine provided a sacred place for their spirits to live on with us in Japan. Inside the city of Tokyo lied this magnificent forest past gargantuan Torii gates, a forest planted for their spirits to wander in.

That's when I realized: if I die, I want a forest to wander in. I want a forest for the ones I love to wander with me.

I remain worried if not uncertain that I cannot have a real post-death forest to wander in. Yet, I found peace knowing I can continue the work I have towards creating a metaphorical forest for my loved ones to wander in. That even without an actual spirit, my human self has many "forests" to wander in with those I love deeply.

Shintoism's belief in communicating with kami leaves me with peace as well. The idea that who I love will continue to communicate with me in the same way people share themselves to the spirits of Meiji and Shoken gives me peace. In a spiritual way, I will continue to communicate with them. I have no physical shrines, but my writings, images, and films will communicate to those left here or to my loved ones. My paper trail can be my forest.

Could this moment of clarity or moment of peace have happened elsewhere? I don't know.

I had this moment in Japan, however. I can thank Japan for this moment.

Final Threads

How can I impose an arc or theme in a place where I can look closely in the Tokyo National Museum at priceless Heian art, then scarf down tempura green beans, and finally sit down on a floor AND WATCH A ROBOT KICK A SOCCER BALL?!?!

There's been an intuitive drive in me to travel to Asia. That drive slowed down as the reality of a post-undergrad life and its financial realities sunk in. I worried Japan would be way over my price range or annual leave range. Yet I did it. With Hong Kong and Tokyo in my life, I have no idea why my drive slowed down for this region. In fact, I don't know why I didn't travel here sooner.

I want Japan again. I want the threads I can find here. But I must relish the new threads I will pull in the future.