This morning, 7.15 a.m., I met Sarah in the city of Winterthur. Sarah is the recipient of a scholarship fund issued by the Swiss Japanese Chamber of Commerce SJCC. On October 1, she will board an Emirates flight to Haneda airport in Tokyo with a stop-over in Dubai to spend a year in Japan. I was interviewing her for the SJCC’s coming anniversary. Every year, the SJCC “sends” a number of Swiss citizens (Sarah is half-Swiss, half-Japanese) to Japan to get to know the country, the language, the culture. Sarah seemed all excited and a little nervous. Similar, I guess, to how I felt six years ago when I was soon to start my Japan year.
Japan seems like an easy choice (safe, except for the earthquakes, clean, nice people, good food), but in a way it’s not. I usually tell people that Japan feels more exotic than for example China does (not many believe me). From the outside, everything in Japan appears so perfect, well organised, industrialised, neutralised, neat, well, so Japanese. But as soon as you leave your airplane this country will get you and trick you in. It’s as if you were Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, planning to stay three weeks in the sanatorium in Davos, ending up with seven years. Time experience is different in Japan. In a famous Japanese legend, Urashima Tarô, a fisherman who rescues a turtle is rewarded with a visit to the palace of Ryûijin, the Dragon God, under the sea. He stays there, for what he assumes, three days, only to realize upon his return to the surface that it was actually 300 years (the same time span Japan was isolated under the Tokugawa Shogunate by the way). I warned Sarah, I did my duty.