Why I Love Japan (And Why It Took Me So Long To Realize It)

[Music] looking back on my life it turns out I was a pretty nerdy kid when I was growing up my child was filled with cartoons and Anime and even to this day they're still my drug of choice when I was growing up I was that little nerdy kid who would pretend like they were Goku and run around play fighting everyone I remember my childhood best friend and I we were obsessed with Pokémon and we created Pokémon cards before they were even a thing and we went to school and sold them all and it was such a great time for as long as I can remember I've always been a huge gamer I'd throw sleepovers at my house and my friends and I would play Tekken and a whole bunch of other video games until the we hours in the morning I was a pretty nerdy kid when I was growing up and not much changed the years after either in high school I continued to watch anime I started to Read Manga I played those stupid bishojo games and owned a tamagachi and I had every games console you could buy later on I'd get addicted to Motorsport and JDM and drift culture and I'd ride motorbikes and got obsessed with the IDE idea of riding the mot circuit one day and then when I finished high school and the idea of becoming an adult was staring me in the face I watched all my friends take gapers and go in wild contiki tours and backpack across Europe and do all that fun stuff cool like seeing the world and getting out there me I went in the complete opposite direction I didn't care at all about travel back then I think at the time I'd only been to like three different countries in my life I also hated classroom learning I've always been a self-starter a self-learner and so as my friends were out exploring the world or starting their uni lives I got into the workforce and started building my career in hindsight getting a four-year head start on most people my age was a pretty good thing it turned out to be a pretty good move for me but yeah I never got to see the world and at the time I didn't really care that I did either I was just some nerdy dude who would go to work and then come home play video games all night when I was 20 I started my design career it was at this time that I was looking for design related stuff to get inspired by throughout my early design career I stumbled across a whole bunch of stuff but I distinctly remember the first time I saw things like minimalistic Japanese graphic design and how different Japanese type setting was I remember the first time I came across yukoh and woodblock printing and the philosophies of Wabi and Japanese ceramics and man I was so enamored with it compared to all the other influences in my life those things just stuck to me and then as an adult when you know I was trying to figure out the whole life thing and you know trying to navigate my way through it I realized that there was so many parallels between traditional Japanese thinking and philosophies and the work that I was producing things like Simplicity and an obsession with stripping things down to the absolute Essentials things like a positive focus on Beauty rather than a shaming or form of a function things like contrast and the idea of balance and healthy opposition these are all ideas that I've used heavily in my visual language over the last decade and I still Ed to this day but all of these were my roots these were some of the biggest parts of my nerdy life when I was growing up and when I was trying to figure out who the hell I was and then I started photography and I made a whole bunch of new friends in the space and there's still people that I hang out with day and it was back then that I really started to think about travel and started to get really addicted to it and I remember the first time that I went to Japan I wanted to go so badly but I didn't want to go alone you know solo travel for me back then wasn't really a thing in my realm of possibility like it is today and it was only after a year or so of like constantly bringing it up with my friends that we managed to finally have the opportunity to go and we decided to go to Hong Kong for some reason or another but we also decided to add some days to Japan before it and so in 2017 for the first time I went to [Music] Japan and I didn't fall head over heels for the first time I stepped for in the country I didn't instantly fall in love with or solve a lifetime's worth of existential problems in a single day it wasn't that romantic as much as I'd love for that to be real because it would make a pretty cool story but instead I'd actually return a couple of times that year and it's only then that I started to really fall in love with it you know it was slow and steady and there was something about it the first time you stepped foot in a comini or your first ichiran experience or the first time your brain explodes when you see Mount Fuji it was also different but somehow still familiar and as the visits went by I started to fall in love with the people the culture the coexistence of traditional and modern the language the snacks all of it and then I began to question my sanity you know I began to ask myself why do I like this place so much what is it about this country that just keeps me coming back why is it so sticky compared to every other country was that just some love sick puppy dreaming up some Twisted romanticized version of what I thought Japan meant to me regardless over the years and the many subsequent visits after I really got to know it deeply and since 2017 I've spent about a year of my life in Japan across these many trips and I've explored it from top to bottom east to west and I've seen so many weird and wonderful things along the way Tory gates in the most random most wonderful places an art gallery literally ins a mountain Landscapes that look like they came straight out of an anime and the memories oh my God the memories I remember the time we unintentionally took the hard hiking trail when we decided to climb out Fuji and it almost killed us and the time we got smacked in the face by a raging snowstorm Hokkaido and just how crazy and exciting that was and that time we were smashing down strong zeros while doing panning shots in the middle of shabuya Crossing like crazy people but it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows though towards the end of my last year living there I became a little bit bitter and a little bit hateful towards the hard realities of what it's like to live there as an expat for real versus just being a tourist and visiting but in taking time to reflect on all of my experiences as a whole I just I can't help but feel this like deep-seated contentment and joy towards not only the people that you know I had these experiences with but the country that I spent them in as well and right now I'm back in Sydney I had to come back because of the pandemic and you know having been in Japan just a mere four months ago this slowdown back home has caused me to think about why I love Japan so much again and why I want to go back so desperately your questions start to pop up again why am I so drawn to this place why is it always Japan and not some other country and I think about childhood and my growing up and I think about identity and I realized that our identity is shaped by our past experiences and it's those experiences that influence our World Views and the way we think of ourselves and then the dots started to connect for me the floating dots of everything I was interested in or inspired by when I was growing up the anime the games the Motorsport the design the art the principles the culture all of it at the time when I was growing up I never really cared that much about the fact that so many of these things came from or had a big influence from Japan it just kind of happened without me noticing I just kind of naturally gravitated towards them but in connecting the dots I realized that all throughout my life I've had a steady influx of Japanese presence of Japanese influence of Japanese culture this is my identity and this is a part of who I am and this is why I feel so comfortable and calm when I'm there it's why I feel such a sense of place it's why I feel such a sense of connection it's because in a way when I'm connecting to Japan I'm connecting with parts of myself that I've been cultivating for my entire life you know this year has been pretty insane for all of us and my friends and I are itching to travel as I'm sure you are as well and the question always comes up is you know where do you want to go after this is all said and done you know where do you want to go to when this is finished and we're okay to travel again and even though I've been to many countries and my bucket list is pretty long when I'm real with myself and I'm asking myself what I yearn for it's Japan and I've come to realize that it's always been Japan and it probably always will be

Channel: Pat Kay Away

Views: 2,564

Keywords: patkay, pat kay, photographer, photography, travel photography, travel photographer, japan, why i love japan, love japan, travel japan, travel to japan, best spots in japan, why japan is good, japan travel, why do people like japan, japan photography, living in japan, life in japan, what its like to live in japan, photography in japan, japanese photographers, working in japan, live in japan

Id: iTTPwu0rPsM

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024