Two summers ago, I was vacationing in Okinawa, visiting my father's side of the family for the first time in 12 years. I was 20 years old, just finished summer school, and looking forward to exploiting the fact that the Japanese drinking age is a year earlier than the one in America.
Eight summers ago, I was vacationing in mainland Japan, visiting my mother's side of the family for the first time in three years. I was 14 years old, just finished middle school, and both dreading and anticipating the fact that I would be starting high school at the end of the summer.
I can count the number of times I've visited each of those places on one hand. Each visit is a frozen snapshot from a specific junction in my life.
Every visit, which lasted three weeks at the most, became a quantum leap in time from the previous visit. A toddler of a cousin suddenly became a college-bound high school student. Childhood playmates from bygone years were now working adults, all serious business. Conversely, relatives back home always marveled at how much taller I've grown, how much more adult I've become. My Americanized Japanese and lack of knowledge of certain Japanese customs were endearing little quirks that came with being the sporadic relative visiting from afar.
Every visit, I eagerly soaked in the feeling of being in a family - not in the nuclear family unit sense of the word - but an entire sprawling family tree where aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and extended relatives all lived within driving distance of each other and all gathered each festival, holiday and event to eat big meals and share all the mundane and significant updates of each other's lives.
Yet - just when I was getting accustomed to the living, breathing rhythm of being reincorporated into the family - our brief stay eventually came to an end and I wouldn't see them again for another long period of time. In-between, my parents, brother and I modestly celebrated our four-person Thanksgivings, Christmases and New Year's all under a single roof.
My former bedroom in my parents' house, now a de facto storage space, is littered with long forgotten souvenirs accumulated from those sporadic trips back to the homeland: Mt. Fuji key chains, little wooden figurines, and tiny enveloped charms intended to ward off fatal accidents.
All I have left of those trips are these forgotten souvenirs and brief, intensely vivid memories that spring up in the mind's eye in the most unexpected moments: the sickly, suffocating smell of incense; swimming in the emerald-sapphire Okinawan ocean; fireworks exploding in the sky to commemorate the festival of the dead.
Less than two weeks from now, I will be in the prefecture of Chiba, in a small town called Kimitsu-shi, which is a two-hour train ride from Tokyo. I will be there for an entire year teaching English. Not only that, through pure happenstance, I will be able to commute to my job from my relatives' house, where my maternal grandparents, my aunt and uncle and my cousin live, all of them whom I haven't seen in eight years.
A year-long stay is drastically different from a three-week visit. As I learned from my five-month time abroad in Singapore, the luster of being in another country wears off in a month's time. Strangers become lifelong friends. New rhythms and patterns of living emerge and persist as day-to-day habits. Everything that was once foreign becomes mundane and taken for granted.
Maybe this is what I've been looking forward to all along. For once in my life, to no longer be a sporadic visitor from abroad, but just another family member living under one roof.
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