Lotta Years

It’s been a lotta years.

I passed the decade mark of my tenure living in Japan last summer. That also means I’ve been studying, listening to and reading, thinking about, or fully immersed in Japanese language and culture for something like 20 years now. Were it a sentient human, my 日本語の歴史 is old enough to drink legally both here and back in the United States.

It’s been a lotta years since I moved up to Tokyo from Nagasaki, too. A decade in Japan means now seven years up in the greater Tokyo blob, whether that be inside a special ward or down in Kanagawa. So that makes it a good seven years since visiting Kyushu, a place I do still truly love, and a chapter in my life I will treasure forever. It’s when I grew immensely as a person, it’s where I met the love of my life, and where I made an incalculable number of friends. I need to go fly down sometime; 申し訳ない、I’m so sorry it hasn’t happened already.

It’s been a few good years since waiting in Fukuoka to meet a girl, with butterflies the size of boulders in my stomach. A first date turned into a second and that quickly turned into a “and” joining our names, the kind of “and” that just sounds like a couple. It took a couple years before we could cement our life together, but I’m so lucky I have her, and that we’re looking at a lotta years together before this all comes to an end. Love you, dear.

It’s now been two and a half years since I had the worst week of my life and lost a parent. Thanks to a global pandemic and some extremely aggressive border control policies on the part of my adopted place of living, that also means it’s the last time I set foot in the United States, and saw most of my family. There was supposed to be a visit back in summer 2020, to prove to my wife that Portland does have sunny weather, when we could put more finality on things, and also take the time to see friends and explore more without feeling dazed or emotionally raw.

Clearly, that visit for closure hasn’t happened, and now almost a million of my fellow Americans are gone as well as many more around the world. They’re all people who are missed by somebody, a person who somebody still living wants to talk to, hug, confide in, invite to holidays, send a present, and so much more. It’s not fair I cannot individually get my closure; it’s unfair that the world has been overturned. Due to the nature of how we perceive the world, these feel like equal grievances in my mind, despite the obvious weighting for one.

And now we’re here. I’m not the same me that I was 10-plus years ago, stepping off a jet plane in Omura and feeling a heat and stickiness in the air that would become all too familiar. But I do think I’m a better me for all the ups and downs, the crappy apartments, the time spent away from loved ones, the time spent with them, and for all the friends and characters popping in to this life that I have. There’s a lot more to do for the first time, a lot to do again, and a lot of bad stories and good lies to tell again.

I don’t know when Japan will be opened back up, but I’ll be here when it does. I don’t know when I’ll fly back to Portland to see friends, but I know there’ll be friends and family waiting on the other end, who don’t care if I saw them yesterday or a lotta years ago. The conversation will pick up right away, like a lotta days and weeks and seasons never passed.