Last weekend, having caught the flu, I suddenly felt homesick. It was the first time I had truly felt homesick since leaving for college. This “home” that I was missing was the city I grew up in: Tokyo. In particular, I was missing my old apartment in Higashi Azabu Juban, which is a mixed-use residential neighborhood nearby where Tokyo’s international community resides. While still a lively place, as it’s in the center of the city, my home feels like a tucked-away corner of the city. In contrast to the bustling and chaotic image that tends to be shown in the media, I have always thought that a more accurate description of my city is that it’s a place of constant change interlocking perfectly together.
Half-delirious from all the medicine I consumed to get rid of my high fever, body aches, and chills, I found myself missing the comforting sounds of cars driving by, the occasional blare of sirens, and even the weekly right-wing protests (over the dispute between Russia and Japan over the northern islands) directed at the Russian embassy nearby where I lived. In my psychology class, I learned about how classical conditioning explains my preference for hearing the sounds of a city in the background, yet by the same principle, I should be used to the serene quietness of Ithaca by now. However, I still find it quite eerie that the loudest sound I hear in my room is usually the low hum of my roommate’s air purifier. Tokyo’s layer of noise is like a comforting blanket, a steady reminder of the surrounding vibrancy of life.
Physically unable to walk the fifteen minutes to the nearest dining hall, in addition to still being pretty contagious, that weekend I ended up eating lots of takeout from the surrounding restaurants in Collegetown. It’s definitely going to be a while before I eat any more of the pork fried rice from Fusia Bento Bar. I found myself scrolling through the photos I took of all the food I ate when I went back over winter break: ramen with deliciously orange boiled eggs, (way too many) ice cream parfaits, okonomiyaki I made at my friend’s birthday dinner, Japanese barbecue, and an oversized (authentic!) omurice. The photos I took for the sole purpose of making my non-Japanese friends jealous were unfortunately having that effect on me. Where I lived was also conveniently located near such good foods, with new offerings popping up every so often. When I went back I found that during the three months that I was away many new places opened up and that even the ground had changed–the fenced-off patchwork of the original dark gray gravel and the newer lighter colored gravel indicating that the sidewalks were in the process of being updated. Yet despite these changes, I could still count on the quality of these restaurants to be high.
But what I miss the most is the anonymity allowed by the size of Tokyo. My favorite spot in my apartment was the balcony. From there I would look down to see the cars streaming past left and right, with an elevated highway above a large intersection in the distance. Right before it gets dark most people’s curtains are open, so sometimes (in a non-creepy way) I liked to look into these squares of light to see snapshots of the lives in the buildings across the street. I was simply one of many windows to peek into–it was nice to feel like an insignificant speck in a sea of the city’s population of nearly fourteen million.
When I returned to this balcony after three months away at university, I realized that I saw this view differently from how I did before I left. I could still see how the city’s environment–the noise, the locations of food, the ease of transportation–coexisted with the people. But now I was no longer one of them, as after the break I permanently moved out. But I know that this change is okay, and hopefully, I can rejoin Tokyo’s dynamic landscape one day.
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