Dancing on the other side of the ocean, on the other side of the pandemic.

An hour and a half from Tokyo, I'm nearly bouncing in my seat, anticipating returning to my "other home" since before COVID closed Japan. I will be bookending the pandemic with Japan trips. My last time was 5 months before the pandemic slammed the door to foreigners in Japan. Japan reopened to tourist travel just 6 weeks ago.

As I watch the little plane in the screen slowly close the distance, I think about what I've missed the most. The food? Hot Springs? Temples and shrines? While I will absolutely enjoy all of those things over the next 10 days, it is none of those that I've missed the most.

It's the people, and the connections. I have dear friends here, and I look forward to nourishing those connections - watering the garden of human relationships developed over years. Those interactions will nourish me, too. I'll be writing about some of them in detail on the coming days.

What I'm looking forward to as I sit here is the connections with people in a more general sense - dancing to the unique rhythms of day-to-day conversations. The way every visit to a store starts with an "Irasshaimase" (welcome), makes a stop at "kashikomarimashita"(certainly), and ends with "arigatou gozaimashita"(thank you). There's a surface-level conversational dance here - everybody knows their part and plays it well.

If you make some effort though, especially if you can speak a little of the language, a new dance becomes available to you. It is the crossfading of "respectful and polite, but distant" into "less overtly respectful, but friendlier" when you meet new people. Stepping out of the box of "tourist" into full personhood is a dance I will never tire of. Meeting new people generally starts with "onihongo jouzu!" ("Your Japanese is skillful!" said encouragingly to anyone who can say "konnichiwa") and moving quickly through niceties to genuine curiosity once it becomes clear that genuine communication can happen - that this interaction can be a reciprocal exchange of human feeling, rather than a tourist - host transaction. It's this connection that reaches below the surface that I crave and enjoy. This dance leaves an impression on both participants, Even if it's just "I met the nicest person today." Conversations like these in Kyoto generally end with "o-ki-ni" (Take care! In the local Kansai dialect), said with the feeling that you really should pay attention to being careful.

The rhythms of human interaction here are different than they are at home - more predictable, more choreographed, and sometimes more earnest and less cynical. Every time I come back, I look forward to the dance.

I can't wait.