Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad - Notes

Friday. March 08, 2024 - 35 mins

My Overall Thoughts

This was a fun book to read. I had no context on the author’s life as a Youtuber but picked up this book since I thought it’d be a fun read before I left on my trip for Japan. I continued reading this on my trip to Japan and it each day it provided me more and more context into the Japanese culture and for that – I’m grateful I ended up reading this.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights

• The perfect foreign teacher should come across as genki(元気) at all times. This commonly used Japanese word means ‘energetic’ or ‘lively’,

• The best way to describe the concept of wabi-sabi(侘び寂び) is that it’s about embracing imperfections and appreciating the beauty in the incomplete or the imperfect. Often the most sought-after hand-made pottery in Japan are pieces that appear asymmetrical, simplistic or modest. This is an ideology very much at the core of Japanese living.

• Walking into a Japanese restaurant for the first time, I was nearly knocked off my feet when everyone from the chefs to the waiting staff erupted with an ‘Irashaimase! Welcome!’ It was a real chorus of tones, from the booming deep voice of the head chef to the high-pitched screech of a passing waitress delicately balancing two hinoki wooden plates.

• The first thing I noticed was the shari – the rice itself. Perhaps the most underrated ingredient in sushi outside Japan, the rice is infused with vinegar, salt and sugar to give it a distinctly sharp, sweet flavour.

• While most images synonymous with Japan are either Tokyo’s urban sprawl or Kyoto’s red-lacquered shrines, in reality, 70 per cent of Japan’s surface area consists of mountains and forests.

• Though I’d never recommend visiting Japan in August unless you want to experience what it feels like to be a rotisserie chicken, there’s no doubt it’s at its most visually striking at the height of summer.

• Weirdly, the thing that threw me most was that I couldn’t see a single patch of grass. Now that I’ve lived here a few years, I’ve realized that most people don’t even notice this absence; in Japan, every patch of land is either a rice field, concrete or a forest-covered mountain. None of the houses we passed had lawns; instead, a mixture of gravel and carefully curated trees adorned the tiny gardens of each home. Even the local parks were predominantly comprised of gravel and sand. I would later learn that less than 1 per cent of schools in Japan had playgrounds featuring grass, and in feudal times only lords would have lawns, and these were ornamental, a visual feast for the eyes.

• You must always remove your shoes before entering a Japanese home and even before entering some public spaces.

• I’d later learn that in Japanese culture these long periods of silence, chinmoku(沈黙), were commonplace. It has its roots in Zen Buddhism, where silence is said to hold the secrets of existence. The Japanese proverb ‘It is better to leave many things unsaid’ captures the essence of chinmoku. Far from being awkward, in Japan silence is a natural part of daily interactions.

• I’d noticed that Japanese strangers tended to flee the moment they realized I couldn’t communicate in Japanese. I got the impression that the idea of escaping was far more appealing than deploying any English knowledge. Or perhaps folks out here really didn’t know any English? I still wasn’t sure.

• Onsen are said to have healing properties, from improving blood pressure and blood flow to exfoliating the skin. Some even believe they’re a reason why the Japanese are one of longest-lived populations on earth.

• find vending machines in the rest area stocked with different-flavoured milks, chocolate and coffee the most popular choices. When public bathhouses exploded in popularity in the 1950s, a milk company had the genius idea of sticking refrigerators in the changing or waiting areas so that bathers could rehydrate after a steamy bath. So ubiquitous are these vending machines, they have effectively become synonymous with bathing culture.

• One popular proverb I’d come across exemplified this: ‘A single arrow is easily broken, but not ten in a bundle.’ The Japanese emphasize working together as a collective. Coming from the UK, I saw this method of teaching less as a team-building exercise and more as a great way to rob the students of any individual empowerment, and this was something I grew to notice more and more during my time working in the Japanese education system. Schools churned out model citizens who followed the rules and rarely questioned authority, but robbed students of any rule-breaking, entrepreneurial spirit.

• It’s estimated that Tokyo has 120,000 bars and restaurants – more than any city in the world – so it’s fair to say that Japan has a thriving drinking culture. It’s very common to head out after work to an izakaya to eat, drink and smoke oneself to oblivion before crawling home in the early hours of the morning.

• Izakaya(居酒屋), literally ‘reside, sake, shop’ are one the greatest joys of living in Japan. They are often cramped holes-in-the-wall, so you find yourself elbow to elbow with strangers who more often you’ll end up sharing a pint with by the end of the night. The first thing you notice about an izakaya is that often there are no windows or any means of seeing inside from the street. While this might suggest something more like a cult than a pub, given the drunken antics within, it’s only natural to conceal the patrons from the prying eyes of passers-by. Behind these walls folk let their hair down after a day of uncompromising rigid politeness.

• I quickly learned that regardless of what you want to drink in Japan, everyone, without fail, starts with namabiiru – draught beer. It’s an unwritten rule of Japanese etiquette. It doesn’t matter what brand, just as long as it’s a draught beer. Whether it’s a work party or with friends, it’s extremely rare for anyone to choose anything else, and the reason behind it is to not complicate the first order and to swiftly get drinks into everyone’s hands.

• Best of all, I’d found eating out in Japan to be relatively cheap, especially given the absence of tipping culture. In Japan, it’s considered almost rude to tip. The Japanese believe that service staff should always be giving their absolute best all of the time, and if you tried to leave money, you’d likely find yourself chased down the street by a waiter brandishing your change.

• English classes were always far more popular with girls than guys. I’ve never understood why this is, but I suspected that Japanese men feel less comfortable making fools of themselves when attempting to speak a new language. Not only that, but English is often seen as a soft, almost girly subject. Boys were expected to throw baseballs and chop wood, not learn a useless language spoken by a billion people. This glaringly antiquated gender norm is still very prevalent in Japanese society.

• With a public outcry against drink driving after high-profile incidents in the 90s and 2000s, Japan reduced the number of drunk-driving incidents dramatically within a decade by taking a two-step approach, instigating harsh penalties and encouraging viable solutions, one of which was an ingenious and highly popular service known as daikou.

• While in most countries the idea of letting a stranger drive your vehicle as you lie drunkenly on the back seat seems bizarre at best and dangerous at worst, in Japan there’s a level of societal trust that makes honour-based systems like this work. Daikou seemed like a uniquely Japanese solution, and during the snowy winter months it was a service I would come to depend upon.

• Arguably the biggest hurdle in mastering the language, Japanese kanji are adapted from Chinese characters, and at first they seem like a rather large flaw in the system. After all, it can take a Japanese student nine to ten years of continuous study to memorize the reading and writing of their own mother tongue. You can pretty much learn the English alphabet in a day and be up and running. But the logographic nature of kanji allows a single character to mean a whole word or concept, so they take up less space. Where we have to laboriously write out the word ‘water’, the Japanese draw this beautiful little character 水. Intuitively, and confusingly, similar words often share the same strokes. ‘Ice’ for example is 氷. It’s practically identical to the character for ‘water’, with an additional flick to the left. I found this captivating, and it was daily discoveries like these that fuelled my excitement at learning a new language.

• I’d always been confused as to why karaoke had never taken off in the West to the same degree it had in Japan. But as Nakamura screeched the night away, I realized that British people just wouldn’t have the patience for it. We’d have to leave the room or smash the karaoke machine. It was testament to the sheer strength of Japanese politeness that, no matter how drunk everyone was or how many ears were bleeding, nobody called an end to the madness.

• Japan’s obesity rate is an astonishing 3.3 per cent. In an era of ultra-processed and fast food, it’s an astonishing feat and one the West would do well to take note of. When I arrived in Japan I was struck by how slim everyone appeared to be, across all age groups.

• A study in 2008 found that people in Japan walk on average two thousand steps a day more than Americans do, and portion sizes are significantly smaller, with Japanese people consuming two hundred calories less a day. Not only that, but the food is far less processed than in the West and rich in superfoods, from natto, fermented soybeans that I beg you never to make me eat, to pickled radishes and the fermented miso used in the soup that accompanies every meal. It’s thought that the carbohydrate-heavy meals(often featuring rice) make people feel full for longer; also, snacking is much less common in Japan. It was certainly the case that compared to my previous office job, where colleagues had a packet of crisps or biscuits next to their keyboard throughout the day, here I noticed few teachers snacking before or after their bento lunch. Combined, these factors added up to a healthy population. And yet as I was soon to learn, one key element is often left out of the story: societal pressure.

• In 2008, Japan received misleading international news coverage for allegedly ‘making obesity illegal’ after announcing the controversial ‘Metabo law’(metabo being a reference to metabolism). To prevent obesity rates from increasing, the new law required companies and local governments to check the waist measurement of people between forty and seventy-five years old each year. If their waistlines exceeded 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women, the company would encourage these individuals to take weight-loss classes and put a plan in place to get them into shape, or face financial penalties. To many, it sounded like a nanny state gone too far and a total intrusion on the freedoms of Japan’s citizens. However, the law received widespread support from the public. With the Japanese government’s burgeoning healthcare costs because of the country’s ageing population, an increase in diabetes and heart disease could deliver a crippling blow to the nation’s already struggling finances. The 3.3 per cent obesity rate suggests it’s working.

• To this day, the view from Ebisu Bridge remains my favourite spot in all of Japan. The intensity of the billboards, the canal boats packed with awestruck tourists, combined with the smell of street food and the sound of young women coaxing passers-by to head to a nearby club, bar or karaoke shop make for an overwhelming and invigorating experience. This is exactly how I’d imagined my new life in Japan – not living in a rice field on the far-flung west coast.

• Osaka was the first Japanese city I’d seen covered in litter. You’ll often hear tourists in Japan remark how sparkling Japanese streets are, despite a noticeable lack of bins(a consequence of the sarin gas attacks in 1995). The streets of Osaka had no such sparkle, but this gave them a rough-around-the-edges, lived-in feel that made exploring the streets and back alleys deeply rewarding. While the polished skyscrapers of Tokyo can sometimes feel a little sanitized, here, where power cables snake above, half-empty beer cans sit overlooking the river and steam bellows out of restaurant kitchens, it truly feels like a living, breathing city.

• Osaka was a popular shopping destination for neighbouring countries such as South Korea, China and Taiwan, and it wasn’t unusual for tourists to fly in to stock up on a bunch of premium Japanese goods and fly home, almost in the same way British tourists would once pop over to France to buy buckets of cheap alcohol.

• Okonomi literally means ‘to one’s liking’. Yaki means ‘fried’. Notice how the ingredients themselves don’t appear in the name. The appeal of okonomiyaki is the variety of flavours that come from the endless possible combinations of ingredients. No two pancakes need ever be the same. The base ingredients are batter and cabbage, and customers then choose from a number of toppings, ranging from meat to freshly chopped seafood, to all manner of vegetables. The dish is prepared either in the Hiroshima style or the Osaka style. In Osaka, the ingredients are all mixed together at once, placed upon a smouldering teppan and moulded into a circle with a short metal spatula. It’s not uncommon to be handed the bowl of ingredients and left to your own devices in front of your very own grill. Hiroshima style is gradually layered upon the grill, cooking first a portion of noodles, then cabbage, stacking the pancake ever higher and finally layering with batter.

• It’s not uncommon for family-run bars and restaurants in Japan to feel like a converted room in someone’s home or apartment. Coming from the UK, where bar licences are essential and the idea of wandering into someone’s home for a drink sounds like the start of an episode of Crimewatch, I’d had difficulty adjusting to this style of Japanese drinking hole, as delightfully characterful as they were. Tokyo alone is believed to have 29,000 bars, and it’s not hard to see how, given the apparently very relaxed requirements to be able to set one up.

• It seemed preposterous that a team of people would climb almost 4 kilometres to the summit of Japan’s tallest mountain with rucksacks bundled with empty cans simply to ‘capture’ the air. And yet if it were any other mountain, I wouldn’t have believed it. Mount Fuji is no normal mountain. So sacred are its slopes that until 1868 women were banned from climbing it, for fear they would distract men from their religious duties. A symbol of Japan, the stratovolcano, with its almost perfect conical shape, had inspired countless artists, writers and poets and had been declared a cultural site by UNESCO that year.

• ‘Remember, Chris san. A wise man climbs Mount Fuji once. Only a fool climbs it twice.’ I was starting to think a wise man would avoid climbing bloody Mount Fuji at all.

• Japanese people have a superpower that I greatly envy. At the click of a finger they’re able to fall asleep and stay asleep until exactly forty-five seconds before they reach their destination. I promise you. Watch a Japanese commuter on a plane, train, bus or horse-drawn carriage. They’ll sit down, sleep, then, as if there’s an alarm clock built into their brain, they’ll snap awake and stumble off at the right stop. Perhaps it’s less a gift and more a symptom of overwork and constantly being switched on. Or perhaps it’s all the rice and the heavy carbs. It’s one of life’s great mysteries.

• Capsule hotels are synonymous with Japan today, but they’ve only been around since 1979, when architect Kisho Kurokawa designed the Capsule Inn Osaka. In the booming post-war years, Japan’s growth was unstoppable and land prices became eye-wateringly high, so designers were led to think ever smaller. For around 2,000 yen($18) a night, guests have access to their very own capsule pod, typically two metres in length, one and a half wide and one high, allowing some limited movement, and often featuring a TV. With a single dorm holding up to fifty capsules, a communal shower and a locker room, guests can enjoy the amenities of a real hotel at a third of the price. What started out as cheap accommodation, however, soon became the saviour of drunken salarymen who would check in spontaneously after a long evening spent drinking, rather than heading home and suffering the consequences.

• God forbid Fuji should erupt. It’s estimated to have the capacity to unleash a level of destruction not seen in Japan since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. If it did erupt, raining ash down upon Tokyo, the world’s biggest metropolis, just 100 kilometres east, it’s projected to cost the economy $25 billion in damage.

• in Japan it’s considered good manners to wear a face mask in public when you’re ill, so as not to pass it on. This habit was common long before the pandemic. In Tokyo, where 3.6 million commuters pass through Shinjuku train station, the world’s busiest, in a single day, it’s not uncommon to find half the passengers wearing masks in winter as a preventative measure. Bizarrely, the younger generation view masks almost as accessories, often communicating the same message as earphones: Stay the hell away from me. I’d get frustrated with certain pupils who kept one on at all times, including one of my top English students who hid behind the mask purely out of shyness. In the space of an entire year, I only caught sight of her face three times.

• Drips are a very popular treatment in Japan. Nearly every trip to the doctor has a complementary drip thrown in, like getting a free air-freshener at the carwash. While I preferred the GP consultations I’d been used to in the UK, Japan’s health service was certainly efficient. And I’d never had anyone in the NHS do me a crayon drawing.

• In the West, we seem to place importance on all the wrong things. Power. Wealth. Celebrity status. In Japan, age is often the determining factor. Senpai means ‘elder’, or senior of the group. A senpai demands respect simply by virtue of being older, in the time-honoured manner set out by the Chinese philosopher Confucius two thousand years ago. A kouhai, or junior, is supposed to speak to their senpai using keigo. I remember hanging out with a Japanese guy in his twenties, chatting casually at a party, and the moment he discovered he was older than me, he started to act and speak differently. His tone changed and he began to sound like he was mentoring or guiding me. He’d switched from being a joker to trying to give me useful advice. It felt bizarre at first, but I soon grew to respect this way of doing things. It was endearing to see people in positions of power act humbly in the presence of their elders. It felt like society as a whole was far more respectful as a result.

• ‘When I was learning English, I tried many memorization methods once I realized that reading from a dictionary was a waste of time. I found the Roman Room method worked well. You imagine you’re inside a room or building you know well and, in each room, you place an object. Using your visual memory can be quite effective.’

• The more vivid and ridiculous the image, the easier it was to recall. I found that after picturing the corridor in my mind and going through each room once or twice, in a matter of minutes I could recall what was in each and every one. I could walk up and down the corridor in my memory, peer into the classroom and be reminded of each paragraph. It was a genuine light-bulb moment. Once again, thanks to a simple memorization technique, what had previously seemed impossible felt achievable.

• To my relief, I was able to not only recall the whole fifteen-minute speech – I won the contest, something that had seemed unthinkable one year earlier. In hindsight, had I not tried and failed so spectacularly in my first attempt, my successful win a year later would not have been possible. It taught me to value failure every step of the way.

• Ijime is an issue that is, unfortunately, entrenched in Japanese schools. A study in 2013 by the Tokyo Metropolitan School of Personnel in Service Training Centre had found that 66.2 per cent of the 9,000 children surveyed had been victims of bullying. Almost half of the respondents – 46.9 per cent – claimed they’d experienced both suffering it and inflicting it. These statistics are hugely worrying, but sadly not difficult to believe.

• The Japanese proverb you’ll hear most is Deru kui wa utareru – the stake that sticks out gets hammered down. No proverb sums up better Japan’s adherence to group conformity and collectivism. To be cast out and avoided is unthinkable in a culture that prioritizes the needs of the group over those of the individual. With tradition so ingrained in daily life, divergence from what is considered the norm is almost always looked down upon. It can be hard to comprehend, especially in a country so often lauded as futuristic and eccentric, but the reality is that the status quo is king. Worst of all, classmates are often more likely to join in with the bullying so as not to go against the grain. Whichever way the group goes, everyone must follow or suffer the consequences. In Japanese the word haafu(literally ‘half’) is used to describe individuals with one Japanese parent and one foreign parent and, though not intentionally derogatory, being branded as haafu is another potential way to feel excluded from the group.

• Bullying manifested itself in different ways. At the most extreme end were acts of violence, but often the cruellest and most affecting tactics were those that left students feeling completely isolated. A report by MEXT(the Ministry of Education) in 2014 found that 19.1 per cent of victims reported bullying through being ignored or excluded by their peer group. It’s hard to imagine the damaging effects, going through this five days a week for years on end.

• People around the world feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to protecting Japan’s culture, even if they’ve never set foot in the country. There’s a bizarre perception that only the outside world can defend the Land of the Rising Sun, a phenomenon I’ve come to call ‘Last Samurai Syndrome’, This refers to the movie where Tom Cruise plays the heroic white saviour, who comes to appreciate the way of the samurai better than the Japanese characters ever could, even the emperor himself.

• For a country that had worked so hard to fight off Western ideals and hold on to its sense of cultural identity, there was one glaring area in which they’d failed. Not only had the nation of Buddhists and Shintoists embraced Christmas, they’d completely bastardized it, with a little help from good old Colonel Sanders.

• I was about to join the estimated 3.6 million Japanese families who treat themselves to the nationwide tradition of spending their Christmas Day eating KFC. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. In 1974, KFC Japan had the ingenious idea of filling the void that Japan faced every Christmas Day. The country had embraced the commercialization of Christmas with all the tinsel and fairy lights you could imagine, but on the big day itself there were no turkeys to tuck into. KFC launched the ‘Kentucky for Christmas’ campaign alongside a seasonal Christmas ‘barrel’ box stuffed full of chicken and promoted it to the masses as the way to celebrate Christmas. Just like Jesus would have wanted. The marketing paid off, and today the premium KFC Christmas menu can cost up to an astonishing 5,800 yen($50), for a whole chicken, fillets in red wine sauce, fries and the all-important Christmas cake – in this case a vanilla and strawberry sponge.

• Finding an apartment as a foreign resident is perhaps the most stressful and alienating aspect of life in Japan. Not only is the process formidably expensive, with ridiculously high upfront costs that simply don’t exist in most other countries, it’s also one of the few areas of life in Japan where discrimination is openly allowed. The ‘no foreigner’ policy is ubiquitous and often the sticking point that leads many foreign nationals to leave the country. I’d met people who’d mastered the language, worked here for a decade and, in some cases, started families, only to bail on the country in the face of xenophobia. Japan isn’t unique for it, but in a country where everyone is incredibly polite and cordial and society has an almost utopian atmosphere to it, it can take foreign residents by surprise when a situation such as this arises and breaks the perfect illusion.

• There’s a Japanese idiom, Neko ni koban, ‘like coins to a cat’, which warns against offering things to those incapable of appreciating them. It was one of my all-time favourite idioms,

• Next up I had to try a range of ‘cat-inspired’ products, including an air freshener that supposedly smelled like a cat’s forehead – whatever that smelled like. Filming in an Airbnb overlooking the majestic Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, I degraded myself by spraying the odour of a cat into my face. The concept of the spray had been to invoke the scent of cat at times of loneliness. Perhaps you’re away on a business trip and longing to be reunited with your beloved pet. With this spray, it’ll feel like they’re right there with you. The spray smelled like asbestos. A musty, shitty smell that invoked childhood memories of an awful village hall in rural England. I cursed the inventor of cat air freshener and hoped to god this smell would wash off.

• Tell me, reader, have you ever sat down in the evening with a glass of red wine, looked over at your sober cat and thought, ‘Oh gosh, little Mittens seems rather left out.’ Of course you have. Well, that, my friends, is where cat wine comes in. You need never drink alone again. With this ground-breaking new venture, you can take your cat along for the ride into flagrant alcoholism. Presented in a 375ml bright green wine bottle covered in paw prints, the average non-Japanese shopper could easily mistake Nyan Nyan Nubou wine for regular wine. However, speakers of the language will note that Nyan Nyan is the Japanese sound for a cat meowing. But as I took a sip of the appalling orange substance, the only sound to be heard was that of gagging as I instantly spat the so-called wine into the sink.

• One Japanese economist described the influence of Tama as Nekonomics, a satirical reference to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic policy, whimsically nicknamed Abenomics. But while Abenomics had been a mixed bag in its attempts to boost Japan’s flagging economy, ironically, Tama the cat’s impact had delivered substantial economic benefits to the local area. And other stations in Okayama and Fukushima had started acquiring their own cat stationmasters to get a piece of the action.

• I’d always been shocked that in Japanese guidebooks Tokyo and Kyoto each have over a hundred pages devoted to them, while northern Japan’s six huge prefectures are granted little more than four or five. Tourists were missing out on genuine wonders – the largest morning market in Japan in the port town of Hachinohe, Aomori; a delicious bowl of ramen in Kitakata, a town in Fukushima with more ramen shops per capita than anywhere else in the country; the magical hot-spring town of Ginzan in Yamagata.

• One of the most unusual aspects of living in Japan is knowing that despite the country being one of the safest on the planet, with low rates of homicide and violent crime the envy of the world, the country lives in the shadow of so many existential threats. While North Korea remains a constant thorn in the side of peace, the real danger lies beneath.

• He noticed that my eyes were fixed on the ruined concrete building. ‘This area has seen many tsunamis over the centuries. But the people forget. We wanted to leave something as a reminder and a warning to future generations.’ While other towns along Japan’s coast had wanted all traces removed, the locals here had voted to keep it as a powerful reminder of the ever-present dangers that lurk beneath the earth.

• Japan boasts the world’s most expensive fruit to date in the form of the Yubari King melon. A record 5 million yen was spent on a pair of Yubari melons in an auction in 2019. It wasn’t necessarily about size, though the melons were larger than average. It came down to the flawlessness of the outer skin; cultivated to be so meticulously round and smooth, it was almost as if the gods had handcrafted the fruit. And don’t even get me started on the grapes; a bunch of Japanese Ruby Roman grapes sold for an astonishing $12,000 at an auction in 2020. I hope the winning bidder ate them slowly. That’s $400 a grape. It’s not uncommon for these budget-busting fruits to be given as gifts on special occasions or as omiyage souvenirs, and the Miyagi Ichigo strawberries were no exception. As I sunk my teeth into one, I could almost understand the ludicrous price. It’s worth noting that the strawberries were the size of apples and utterly perfect in appearance. Strikingly red, and quite literally polished to glimmer in the sunlight, they looked more like the plastic food replicas you’d find displayed in the window of a restaurant. But it was the taste that made it all make sense. The moment I pierced the thick, fleshy skin, the juices flooded my mouth. They were sweet, flavourful and frighteningly addictive, and I vowed to stay away from trying more, lest I pick up an expensive fruit addiction.

• The farmers of Yamamoto chose strawberries because of the conditions required for growing the fruit. Typically grown in carefully controlled conditions, Sendai’s mild annual climate provided the ideal weather, and the sprawling land that had once been used for rice had a purpose once more. The polished strawberries were finding customers everywhere from Tokyo to Saudi Arabia and creating a fantastic export opportunity for the Tohoku economy. It was a great example of innovation in the face of the worst possible situation.

• ‘The secret to getting through the pain is I don’t look back,’ she told me. ‘If I ever look back at what happened, it’ll be when I’m seventy or eighty. I don’t want to dwell on the past, nor do I expect too much from the future. If I can get by now, if I can live in the moment, I can keep going.’

• Until the tsunami documentary, I’d never felt proud of any of my videos. But when I released it, the outpouring of comments from viewers around the world inspired by the stories of Ichiyo Kanno and the reconstruction of Onagawa made me understand the power and satisfaction that comes from sharing important stories with the world. The video featured in an article in the Nikkei Financial Times, one of Japan’s most respected newspapers, and the then CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, endorsed it on Twitter. I felt like I was really making waves. But most importantly, in the years since the release of the documentary, many Abroad in Japan viewers have made the long journey 400 kilometres north to the city of Kessenuma to stay at Ichiyo’s inn. It remains one of the proudest chapters of my career.

• A survey by the newspaper Mainichi Shinbun found that the trauma caused to locals by displacement had led to the deaths of 1,600 evacuees in the year since the disaster, more than the number of deaths in Fukushima caused by the tsunami. And worse still was the stigma associated with the evacuees who arrived in towns and cities across Tohoku. ‘People said they’re infected; you’ll catch it. Don’t get married to women from Fukushima. Many people endured this kind of rhetoric,’ recalled Masami Yoshizawa, a farmer who lives just 14 kilometres from the reactor.

• We both agreed that the Philosopher’s Path, a hidden stone track along a canal in Kyoto’s Higashiyama district, was a highlight. Free from any clear attractions or photo opportunities, the path was devoid of tourists, allowing us to contemplate the beauty of the city as we strolled past traditional homes, encountering a kind old man making boats from fallen leaves and sailing them downstream.

• As I relaxed on a bench in Maruyama park – Kyoto’s most popular hanami cherry-blossom-viewing spot in spring – I watched a Japanese family wander across a wooden bridge that stretched over a pond, searching the surface of the water for koi carp as the cool autumn breeze rustled through the trees. At that moment, I started to wish I’d put Kyoto on my JET application all those years ago. A few peaceful moments alone was all it took to make me appreciate this ancient city’s ever-lasting allure.

• There are around 40,000 wooden machiya in Kyoto. Poke your head down any alleyway in the city and the odds are you’ll spot one of these traditional townhouses. One giveaway is often the kōshi lattices shuttering the windows, for added privacy and discretion but still allowing light in. Each design has a meaning: windows covered from top to bottom indicate a liquor store, while kōshi that use slimmer pieces of wood signify a kimono or textile shop. Machiya are sometimes referred to as unagi no nedoko, literally, ‘eel’s nest’. Thankfully, the houses aren’t littered with eels; it’s a reference to the long, narrow, often deceptive layout of a machiya. In the Edo era, properties were taxed according to their street frontage, so they were extended ever backwards. Sliding open the front doors, if the townhouse sold goods, you’d immediately enter into the shop space, and a further door would take you into a large living room concealed within, often described as the kakureya, or ‘hidden space’. Due to the lack of windows and the labyrinthine rooms, machiya feel incredibly cosy, but far from being dark or cramped, the home is built around a small courtyard, or tsuboniwa. It’s not just for aesthetics; the tsuboniwa allows a space for reflection and improves airflow through the interior, something that is desperately needed in Kyoto’s humid summer months. Built of natural materials, from the wooden beams and paper sliding doors to the tatami mats, the inside of a machiya has an atmosphere of unmatched calm, and the wooden surfaces provide a soft, warm illumination to each room.

• We’d always been so close, yet so far, and Yasu was claiming that this whole time we could have simply sent a bloody letter? If any other person had proposed it, I would have shot it down. But like all good entrepreneurs, Yasu was ruthlessly persistent. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose. Best case they read the proposal and say yes, worst case they ignore it.’ I reluctantly agreed, and Yasu put together a slick proposal and sent it, hand delivered, to Ken’s management agency. A few days later, I was off shooting a video in Asakusa with Ryotaro when I got a phone call from an ecstatic Yasu. Ken was very much interested. ‘His manager said we could join Ken for a week up in Kesennuma and shoot while he’s in town for an event he’s taking part in.’

• For all the terror it had inflicted, the 2022 Fukushima earthquake(as it came to be known) had shown how good Japan was at adapting to the chaos Mother Nature dealt out so ruthlessly. I’d come across it before, when meeting survivors of the 2011 tsunami – Japanese people have an unbreakable spirit and a stoic mindset that I’ve come to respect and admire greatly. People dusted themselves off and got back to work the next day as if nothing had happened.

• But to avoid Japan due to earthquakes would be to avoid the sea for fear of sharks, or aeroplanes for fear of crashing. As they say, ‘to live in fear is to never live at all’.

• These are certainly all moments I’ll treasure until the day I die. But the truth is, the really special memories I return to on a bad day are often the most unremarkable. Sitting alone on a remote beach after finishing work, gazing across the sea at a dormant volcano, deeply grateful that fate brought me here. Watching the snowfall billow across the window of the yakitori restaurant as Natsuki and I ride out the bitter cold and tuck into yet another plate of greasy grilled chicken. Disappearing into the mountains on a weekend jaunt, driving my rickety Toyota Starlet in circles and chancing upon a crumbling torii at the entrance of a forgotten hamlet. The thrill of living in Japan is not quite knowing what surprise lies in store for you next. And if being here for ten years has taught me anything, it’s that there’s always one more wild discovery waiting for you, just around the corner, in the Land of the Rising Sun.