It's the smell!

I'm staying with a fellow Japanologist friend here in Tokyo, and she asked me last night, jokingly, if I could smell the difference now that I was in Japan. The thing is, walking around this morning, I really could. It smells like tatami here - a musty, vegetable smell that I'm sure is the effect of the persistent humidity.

That smell, more than anything else, makes me feel like I'm back. For the last four years, returning to Japan has been my constant, though sometimes distant, goal. I didn't really remember how much I love it here, though, until this morning. The colors, the shapes of the houses, the bowing, the constant press of new kanji, new words, new ideas. I feel alive here.

A woman walking her dog came toward me as I walked down a typical Japanese residential street - narrow enough to stretch your body across but intended nonetheless for bidirectional auto traffic. No, I don't understand how they do that - I think physics must work differently here. Her dog found me inexplicably fascinating. Maybe he's never seen a guy with long blond hair? In any case, he trotted toward me, freezing just out of arm's reach. I reached my hand out, he startled and ran away to his owner, who bowed to me and wished me a good morning.

It was a perfectly normal thing, this encounter, but it was magical. Because it was in Japan. Because I'm in Japan. And because fatigue poisons can rot your brain, leaving the dying wreckage of your intellect just staring at the whole world, going "dude.... cool."