’Natsukashi’

This morn­ing, with the dying of this sum­mer and notic­ing the short­en­ing of the hours of light in the evening, I re­mem­bered that ex­actly two decades ago I went with my new wife to live in the city of Kyoto, in Japan.

It be­came pos­si­bly the sin­gle most in­flu­en­tial ex­pe­ri­ence in and on my life. To look at a pe­riod of what be­came three years and see it as one com­plete ex­pe­ri­ence (or a col­lec­tion of thou­sands of ex­pe­ri­ences wrapped into one) is ob­vi­ously un­usual. But Japan is ex­actly that: un­usual. In fact, it’s unique. Liv­ing there, I found my­self some­times say­ing to my­self or who­ever was near me, “Every­thing here is dif­fer­ent. Every­thing!”

Of course not lit­er­ally every­thing is, in fact, dif­fer­ent there but that was how Japan and its peo­ple struck you, es­pe­cially at first sight. Es­sen­tially, Japan­ese peo­ple want the very same things as you and I, and the rest of the in­hab­i­tants of the planet. We all ba­si­cally want love, food, shel­ter, re­spect and sat­is­fac­tion. But it often seemed that how they thought they would get these wants was a polar op­po­site to me, a 30-year-old male from Aus­tralia, so ge­o­graph­i­cally close to Japan.

The Japan­ese lan­guage is unique, too, like every lan­guage, I sup­pose. There’s a word in Japan­ese - “nat­sukashi” - for which the clos­est trans­la­tion in Eng­lish is “nos­tal­gia”. This trans­la­tion, though, does not do jus­tice to such a com­plex, nu­anced word that is ac­tu­ally a highly emo­tional one.

In Japan you would find even pri­mary school chil­dren say­ing this word, not just adults. I think this is be­cause from a very young age in Japan you are taught (or at least in­flu­enced) by par­ents, schools, and wider so­ci­ety to re­flect back on your ac­tions, your ex­pe­ri­ences, and even in­di­vid­ual mo­ments. This is a men­tal­ity not cur­rently in vogue in much of the West­ern world, partly be­cause Japan is a very for­mal so­ci­ety.

There is a struc­ture, a rit­ual, an ac­cepted com­posed method and set order (and a set order of words in a phrase) for vir­tu­ally every daily ac­tion the Japan­ese do; whether it is eat­ing, leav­ing home, get­ting to or leav­ing school or work, or even how you con­duct re­la­tion­ships with peo­ple. To my wife and I and our non-Japan­ese friends, for at least a year or two, this was mys­ti­fy­ing, con­fus­ing, frus­trat­ing but even­tu­ally some­how com­pre­hen­si­ble. Al­though it was quite sim­ple to un­der­stand and learn the ba­sics of daily rou­tine, hav­ing re­la­tion­ships with Japan­ese peo­ple was an­other mat­ter, de­spite the fact that al­most every­one was ex­tremely kind to us.

The mul­ti­ple lay­ers of mean­ing that every­thing has in Japan can be seen in my cur­rent nos­tal­gic yearn­ing feel­ing to­wards Japan through the word ‘nat­sukashi’.

It turns out that my un­der­stand­ing of this word was not quite on the mark though. After re­search­ing it, I find that this feel­ing is bet­ter ex­pressed by the longer word ‘mukashi­wonat­sukashimu’. ‘Nat­sukashi is ap­par­ently a more sim­ple term for some­one or some­thing that is dear, de­sired or missed.

Next month, I plan to write a fol­low-up ar­ti­cle on some spe­cific ex­am­ples that il­lus­trate the points I’ve made above about Japan, this most unique of unique places. Until then, I’ll fin­ish with a ‘haiku’ I wrote in Japan. ‘Haiku” is the tra­di­tional 5-7-5 syl­la­ble sim­pli­fied form of po­etry that’s de­signed to re­call a sin­gle mo­ment:

Por­tuguese song voice

Sweet, con­trolled, but free and light

Heard in a night street.