Hello diary. I'm listening to Threads by Now, Now. A nice way to relax after a long day. I'm spending some time in Japan.

A few days ago I took the bullet train. I didn't do anything on the train. I actually had a great time doing nothing. Purposefully, I have the dumbest and slowest phone possible so I spend more moments like this. That has been my recent solution to rediscovering Boredom. Two hours staring out the window at the gentle rolling rushing beautiful countryside is priceless time.

Earlier in the day, which was my first full day here, I got rained on. Lightly, but still, my morning was spent slightly damp walking around Chidorigafuchi park. The cherry blossoms will bloom very soon. When that happens the country will be drenched in pink falling petals. But this morning the flowers in Chidorigafuchi had not even bloomed. The brown-black trees traced the shape of a cozy roof over the park. The limbs vaguely protected me from rain. I lingered for some time.

This little park is special to me. It's where I spent my first full day after arriving in Japan to study at Sophia University. It was the same time of year, late March, 8 years ago. Even though official registration for Sophia was in early April I decided to arrive early so I had time to relax and explore Tōkyō, which placed me here in this park in late March. I hadn't expected the cherry blossoms nor the accompanying festival in Chidorigafuchi. Those few days in Chiyoda were deeply moving. Today, too, was moving in a bit of a different way.

In many ways I feel so far removed from who I was 8 years ago. Especially the circumstances: I was in college, single, and about to spend a full semester studying abroad in a country whose language I'd been studying independently since I'd matriculated. Wasting a day doing absolutely nothing in Japan was literally just a Tuesday for me. It's different today. There is leisure time for me here but no class to look forward to. No train to catch. No groceries to buy. I'm just passing through.

Eight years ago, living in Japan was a real possibility. I could drop everything post-graduation and move here and work as the token foreigner in a mostly Japanese office. Even if forever a card-carrying gaijin in Japan, I did at least have that opportunity should I choose to pursue it.

Today, things are different. I have a loving husband and a very cute dog. When I leave home, the dog has to stay with someone for that amount of time. Sometime in the next few years we'll have children and you can't exactly hand them off to someone for a few weeks like you can with a poodle. I don't regret any minute of the life I've lived in the span of these 8 years. But I do mourn that now, at the end of them, the mystery and wonder has evaporated. I know how it ends.

For that reason I can't help but feel a little sad when I visit Chidorigafuchi park.

This week is my first time in Kyōto and even though I've only been here a couple days it's already detectably very different from Tōkyō. There are mountains in three cardinal directions bordering the city. The subway here is strictly worse than Tōkyō (sorry!). The bus is almost a necessary mode of transport if you're not taking a car or cab. There's far more castles and ruins. They use a different IC card.

Today I visited Nijō Castle. It is a tidy castle built by Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the first shogun and the great unifier of Japan. He ended the Warring States period. Until the Meiji Restoration, Japan enjoyed an era of peace under a shogun-emperor duality.

We visited Nijō in the morning and went to a nice restaurant for lunch. Teppenyaki wagyu. I've never had a teppenyaki dinner before where the chef hasn't done the funny trick with the mustard bottle. Real teppenyaki is nothing special.

To close out the day I dropped in to the Lashinbang and bought this:

You can never go home again. But it's beautiful to visit.