Arigatō Gozaimasu

Transitioning to Japan was easy. Like returning to something you already knew would be good.

We were ready to leave Haeundae Beach — and I want to come back to that, because by the end we had made something real out of those last weeks in Busan, found our corners and our people and our rhythms, the way we always eventually do. But the leaving itself, when it finally came, felt right.

The timing was right. We were ready.

The journey was unremarkable in the best possible way. Hours to kill in Busan’s small, manageable airport — tax refunds navigated, food eaten, coffee drunk, books read, these words begun. The flight to Osaka took less than ninety minutes. And then we stepped off the plane into the late afternoon air and I stopped walking for a moment.

It smelled of Japan.

Clean. Precise. Like everything has been checked and considered and found acceptable. My children shouted it before I could find the words: it smells Japan and it’s so good. And it was. It was so good that I couldn’t stop smiling even through the tiredness, even through customs, even through collecting our mountain of luggage and boarding the transfer bus and then the train to Kyoto Station. Even when the taxi driver at Kyoto Station somehow fitted all of our bags into his immaculate vehicle — with a smile, and a patience, and an evident desire to help that made me think immediately of the Uber driver in Busan that morning, who had arrived annoyed at the sight of us and had barely concealed his reluctance to take us at all.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the comparing.

I am going to compare. Quite a lot. You have been warned.

What Korea Gave Me in the End

South Korea is a country in extraordinary, rapid development — ambitious and loud and alive with an energy that is genuinely thrilling once you find your footing in it. And I did, eventually, find my footing.

What made the difference, in the end, was not a neighbourhood or a coffee shop or a running trail, though all of those helped. It was people. It is always people.

There was the owner of our favourite café near Haeundae — the one we returned to so often that he learned our coffee order, greeted us by name, and on our last day sent me a message on Instagram saying he would miss us. For a nomad, that kind of thing lands differently than it might for a tourist passing through for a week. It is a thread of human connection in a life that is otherwise constantly moving, constantly new. I pack those threads carefully. They are among the things I carry that weigh nothing and mean everything.

And there was one particular late afternoon — my daughter and I walking to a small Buddhist temple near Haeundae-dong, the kind of spontaneous outing that this life makes possible on an ordinary Tuesday. She asked if we could stop for a chocolate drink from our favourite café. I told her I wasn’t sure if they were still open, but that we could try. We turned the corner and found the owner just locking up — obviously finished for the day, keys in hand. He asked, with a smile, where we were going. I explained about the temple, and mentioned that she had been hoping for one of his chocolate lattes, but that of course it was fine, we’d come back tomorrow.

He said: wait.

Turned around. Unlocked the door. Disappeared briefly inside. Emerged with a cold chocolate latte and a bag of three cream-filled puff pastries — for the kids, he said, knowing I had three of them.

I thanked him more times than was probably coherent. I didn’t have the words for what that small act meant — not just as kindness but as a kind of love. The unsolicited, unprompted, entirely unnecessary generosity of a person who simply chose, in that moment, to give something. That afternoon stayed luminous: the chocolate drink, the walk, the temple, the wind moving through the chimes, the vast spread of Busan unfolding below us from the hill.

There was also the owner of the sourdough sandwich restaurant where I stopped almost every day — for a loaf of bread, a chocolate baguette, lunch, whatever I needed. He learned my face. Greeted me like a regular. When I placed a large order for burger buns — not something on the menu — he took it without hesitation and had them ready on time. These are small things. They are also everything.

And yet Korea also had its friction. The taxi drivers who were more irritation than help. The small gym where the staff rarely offered assistance when I was clearly struggling to set up my stations alone — though a woman once appeared and helped me, and I wondered afterwards, knowing more about Korean culture and its particular relationship to gender and hierarchy, whether that said something about who was and wasn’t considered worth helping.

There was also the smell in parts of Haeundae — sewage, and too many men urinating in corners and behind parked cars, and litter catching in the wind. Small indignities of a place still finding its standards in certain areas.

But the threads of connection I gathered in those seven weeks — those I keep. Those I carry.

Arigatō Gozaimasu, Fourteen Times in Twenty Minutes

Landing in Japan felt, as it always does, like a different register of living.

Everything here is precise. Everything has been considered. The toilets have more functions than some appliances I have owned. The strawberries — and I will get to the strawberries — are categorised by flavour profile, grown hanging above the soil so they never touch the ground, cultivated in at least twenty-seven varieties by people who have dedicated their professional lives to the perfection of a strawberry.

Japan is extraordinary in a way that both delights and unsettles me, because I keep asking: at what cost? And to whom?

Our first morning in Kyoto, we went out for coffee and found a café with exactly the kind of espresso we had been hoping for.

We sat down, happy. And then, every time the door opened — every entrance, every exit, every completed order — the entire staff turned toward the customer and called out, loudly and in perfect unison: Arigatō gozaimasu. Thank you very much. The enthusiasm was genuine. The commitment was total. The volume was overwhelming.

We counted. In twenty minutes, it was directed at us or around us at least fourteen times. My nervous system, which had just spent seven weeks navigating Korean overstimulation in a different register, quietly requested that I leave. We agreed that we had received, between us, enough gratitude for the entire remainder of our stay in Kyoto.

The coffee was excellent. We did not go back.

This is Japan, though. The exquisite and the excessive coexisting in the same space, the same gesture, the same cup of coffee. The rules are unwritten but completely present. The hospitality is genuine but sometimes overwhelming. The standards are extraordinary but you occasionally wonder what it costs the person maintaining them to hold that level of performance every single day.

The Strawberry Farm and the Japanese Art of Everything

Yesterday my daughter, our friend, and I went to a strawberry-picking farm outside Kyoto. Forty minutes of unlimited picking.

We were greeted at the entrance, given tools, shown an informational video, guided through the process with the focused care of people who take strawberry picking seriously — because of course they do, because this is Japan, and in Japan if something is worth doing it is worth doing with complete dedication.

Inside two enormous glass houses, the strawberries hung in rows at perfect picking height — never touching the soil, grown in a system designed for both quality and ease.

And the varieties. Twenty-seven of them, at least: small and intensely juicy ones, large and delicate ones, a bubble gum flavoured variety that made my daughter’s eyes go wide, a pineapple one, a peach one, a coconut one. And at the end of each row, behind a small sign, the white premium strawberries — one per person, not to be exceeded.

I ate mine slowly. It was the best strawberry I have ever had. It brought me back to the long summer days when I was a kid and when you could go in your parents vegetable garden to pick fist red strawberries of the season and how by the end of the summer you have been eaten so many that you kind of was grateful that summer and strawberries season was over knowing that by the next one you would be as excited and eager to consume all over again.

This is what Japan does — it takes something ordinary and, through patience and obsession and an almost religious commitment to craft, turns it into something that makes you stop and pay attention. The strawberry farm is a perfect metaphor for the whole country. Maximum care. Minimum waste. Results that justify every rule.

And yet — the other day we visited two gyms to decide which one to join. All we needed was a brief look around. At one, we were required to fill in a lengthy registration form before being admitted for what would have been a two-minute visit. We waited. Watched other customers served ahead of us despite arriving after us. Eventually a colleague was summoned to show us around. My husband was late back to work.

The efficiency that Japan is famous for had, in this instance, been entirely subsumed by the process designed to ensure it.

Both things are Japan. The strawberry farm and the gym form. The fourteen arigatōs and the taxi driver who fit all our bags in with a smile. The extraordinary dedication and the occasional suffocation of rules that have perhaps outlasted their original purpose.

I thought coming to Kyoto would mean slowing down — digesting the last five months, letting the Traveling Village chapter settle into memory before the next thing began. Instead I find myself planning and researching and booking and doing and eating and drinking, wanting more of everything, trying not to break too many rules while also finding the ones worth breaking.

Japan does that to me. It has always done that to me. There is something here that quickens rather than quiets — a beauty so considered and a craftsmanship so evident that it makes you want to consume it all before it disappears, even though it won’t, even though it will be here long after we have moved on.

The days are flying.

Arigatō gozaimasu, Japan.

For the strawberries, the taxi driver, the coffee.

For reminding me, again, that extraordinary things are made slowly, carefully, and with complete attention.

We are trying to pay the same kind of attention back.