As Japan Grows Distant, Where Am I Still Headed?

Some time has passed since we started living in Barcelona. And then, one day, I noticed that Japan was growing distant.

I don't mean physical distance. If I get on a plane, I can go back. If I want to reach someone, I can contact my family, friends or the people I work with right away. When I open my laptop, there are emails in Japanese, there's Slack, there's the work that carries on in Japan.

Even so, the air of my days in Japan, the feel of sitting down to work, the self who woke each morning and naturally thought about what needed doing that day — their outlines are slowly blurring.

Anyone who has lived abroad may have felt something similar. Once the hectic paperwork of settling in calms down, a peculiar loneliness, one I never felt while living in Japan, quietly creeps in.

Why did I come here? What am I trying to do here?

Seen from Japan, this city held dreams, hope and possibility. But once it becomes your actual life, what's there isn't only beautiful scenery. The visa, work, money, language, the future. Living abroad also means that, in exchange for freedom, you carry questions without answers almost every day.

When May came, we left Barcelona, already starting to be wrapped in summer heat, and headed for Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands.

The Canary Islands are said to be islands of eternal spring, blessed with some of the best weather on earth. The average yearly temperature is around 21 degrees Celsius, with more than 300 sunny days a year. In winter, many people come from the cold, dark north of Europe in search of the sun.

During our stay, I never once saw a cloudy sky. The high was 21 degrees. Not too hot, not too cold, just pleasant. It was wonderful weather.

We stayed in Las Palmas, the largest city on the island, lying on the beach, walking along the water's edge, and taking a rental car on unhurried drives around the island. I had assumed that this far out I wouldn't meet any Japanese people, but one morning, walking on the beach, I went into a specialty coffee shop I came across, and a Japanese barista greeted me with a “Konnichiwa!”

Ordering an oat milk latte, I talked with him for a while.

He had lived in Spain for six years, and had moved from San Sebastián to Gran Canaria last year. That I'd recently moved to Barcelona, visas, what each of our cities was like. When Japanese people meet abroad, the conversation naturally goes that way.

After we'd covered all that, I asked him, almost casually.

“How's life in Spain?”

He paused for a moment and said this.

“I don't have money, but I'm truly rich.”

Those words stayed in my head for a long while.

They sounded bright, but behind them I sensed time spent, somewhere a little removed from Japanese values, asking himself again and again what richness meant to him. Having money. Being stable. Being accepted by society. In Japan, those easily look like the right answer in life. But the Japanese people I meet in Spain seem to carry a slightly different yardstick.

It can look like freedom, and it can look like loneliness. It can look like strength, and it can look like resignation. But at the very least, they were the words of someone trying to take responsibility for his own life.

After Gran Canaria, we went to San Sebastián, which my wife and her friend had been set on visiting.

We landed at Bilbao airport, and the moment we got on the bus, Japanese came flying at us from behind.

“Are you from Okinawa!?”

“Oh, no, um...”

As I started to answer, he laughed and said,

“It says OKINAWA on the back of your shirt!”

Only then did I realize I was wearing a sweatshirt I'd bought at a café in Chatan, in Okinawa. For some reason, I answered, “Thank you.”

The one who'd called out to us was a university student. He was on a one-year exchange in Bilbao from a university in Niigata. He loved soccer, and apparently he had chosen where to study for no other reason than that he was a fan of Bilbao's club.

“Are you in Bilbao for sightseeing?”

“No, we're going to San Sebastián.”

At that, he looked a little pleased.

“San Sebastián's a great pick. It's really the best. For the past few years, thanks to Takefusa Kubo, some bars have even started keeping Japanese menus, and everyone's super kind to you just for being Japanese. I'll tell you a few of my favorite places.”

With that, he walked us to the bus stop and disappeared into the streets of Bilbao.

I hadn't expected to talk with Japanese people so many times in a row in Spain. The barista in Gran Canaria. The student in Bilbao. Each was in Spain for his own reasons, living in his own place. They seemed happy and cheerful, a little tinted by the Spanish air. But at the same time, I felt that beneath it there was also a loneliness only someone living alone in a foreign country can know.

In San Sebastián, we hopped through more than ten bars and cafés. There was the sea, there were mountains, there were old streets; it was a place where just walking was enough to feel fulfilled.

Still, in the week or so we were away from Barcelona, I missed it again and again.

The moment we got back, my body understood why: the climate.

The air of Barcelona, at least for us, is a kind of good medicine. Just walking, just breathing, the body regains its strength from the inside. I can't explain it well in words. I think it's a feeling you can't understand without actually walking this city.

After we got back, it felt so good that I couldn't sit still at home. I returned to days of walking and walking, chasing the sun. Walking on without any reason. Until my feet hurt. Until the sun goes down.

Meanwhile, Japan keeps growing more distant.

We do, to no small extent, work in Japan. We can be in Spain because there's a digital nomad visa for remote workers and because our work in Japan continues. And yet, as time piles up in Barcelona, Gran Canaria and San Sebastián, the feel of working in Japan is slowly fading.

What was Japan like again?

How did I used to do my work in Japan?

I open my laptop. I read messages in Japanese. I know what needs doing. But the temperature of Japan on the other side of the screen, I can't recall as clearly as before.

What would happen if my work in Japan just slipped away like this? Whether to continue or to stop is up to me. I know that. But Japan feels so far away that I don't seem able to face my work the way I used to. Lately, that has really been troubling me.

Is what I'm doing now truly something my life needs?

When I was in Japan, I almost never asked myself that about work. There were things in front of me to do, and getting through them was everyday life. But since we started living in Barcelona, that given has slowly begun to waver.

In my head, I know what I should do. Have several businesses I can carry with me. Make an income free from place, in a form that doesn't contradict the way we live. But how. The question loops again and again. I think about it at my laptop, then go outside and think about it walking the streets of Barcelona. Still, the question doesn't go away.

Something happens in Barcelona every day, almost uncannily. In the morning the city is buzzing with a marathon, in the evening there's FC Barcelona's championship parade, and the next morning a demonstration about education has begun. The supermarkets are lined with fresh vegetables and fruit, and walking the streets, you see people happily eating at sunny terrace tables. The people you meet are kind, and you rarely have a bad experience.

I think people are really meant to be able to live this joyfully. And yet I go on worrying about one thing and another.

Maybe it's because I'm not Spanish. Maybe it's because I can't speak Spanish. Wherever I go, I'm Japanese.

Japan is growing distant. But I can't escape being Japanese. Within that contradiction, I am in Barcelona.

While I was in San Sebastián, my family got in touch to say my grandfather had died.

My grandfather was the one who made the starting point of who I am now.

After working as a journalist for about forty years, he retired and kept traveling until the very day he died. His way of getting around was a bicycle. He left several bicycles at stations all over Japan and rode every one of Japan's old national highways by bicycle alone. In his seventies, he learned how to fly, booked his own plane tickets, and carried a folding bicycle all the way to New Chitose Airport. He died, I was told, because in the mountains deep outside Kyoto the bus didn't come as scheduled, and he ran out of strength while walking to his destination. To the very end, it was an end so like him.

I thought about going back to Japan right away. But I stayed in Spain. I felt a little guilty about that. At the same time, though, I wondered what my grandfather would think.

What my grandfather taught me was the joy of travel. The joy of going farther and farther. Heading for places you don't know. Moving forward on your own feet. Finding something anyway, on a road that doesn't go as planned.

My grandfather made his way along Japan's roads by bicycle, and I cross borders with a laptop. Ways of living and working have changed into shapes once unimaginable. I think I'm one of the people inside that change, too.

That's exactly why it may be natural to feel anxious. Maybe it's natural that there's no answer. The feeling of Japan growing distant, the fear of not knowing where I'm headed, may be a process I need right now.

Writing my feelings out like this settles my heart, just a little. Maybe writing is my tranquilizer. Whenever I'm anxious, I always want to write something. Writing doesn't change the situation right away. Even so, the act of writing slowly untangles something knotted up inside me.

Japan is growing distant. That is lonely, and it's frightening. But at the same time, it may be a sign that I've begun moving toward somewhere different from before.

I still don't know where I'm headed. The one thing I do know is that I don't want to stop walking yet.

As a foreigner, as a traveler, the loneliness and anxiety of living in an unfamiliar land. I think for a while now, my life will be one of continuing to face that. Even so, the one thing I want never to let go of is hope for the future.

I think I'll keep walking, just a little longer.