Japan is one of those places that seems to have acquired its own place on the bucket list before most of us have quite worked out why.
It is the destination everyone says they must visit, usually while imagining cherry blossoms, sushi, temples, and a bullet train moving through a landscape with suspiciously good lighting.
Sarah Tucker
Neither of us had been before but as a more seasoned traveller I thought I may be taking the lead. Wrong.
I have travelled extensively and have acquired the sort of confidence that comes from knowing how to read a map, navigate an airport and book a taxi before discovering that the taxi rank is somewhere completely different from where the airport says it is.
Tom is less burdened by experience. He is quicker with technology, more interested in investigating things than categorising them, and has an irritating habit of being right.
Our Cathay Pacific flight arrived in Tokyo two hours late, shortly after midnight. I wanted an Uber. Tom wanted two trains and a ten-minute walk.
I went with the trains. He was right. It was becoming a theme.
Tokyo does not particularly encourage the idea that things should remain in their allotted categories.
Our hotel, Park Hotel Tokyo, has rooms transformed by artists into immersive works of art. The toilets appear to have more technological capability than some people I know.
Ancient ritual sits comfortably beside neon, robotics and convenience stores selling food that looks as though it has been designed by an exceptionally meticulous jeweller.
At the Studio Ghibli Museum, the instruction is “Get lost together”. Excellent advice when travelling with a grown-up son.
Sarah Tucker
We also had a private samurai sword lesson
We learned how to draw, pose and swing wooden swords before practising in pairs. Tom, having spent years at drama school, was a natural. Give him a sword, a stance and an audience, and he was, frankly, in his element.
I was still trying to remember what my feet were doing.
Our instructor was connected with Tetsuro Shimaguchi, the sword artist and choreographer associated with Kill Bill. The lesson had a pleasing seriousness to it, although pretending to be Uma Thurman was difficult to resist.
Then we went north to Shibu Onsen, where I discovered that even shopping in Japan could become performance art.
I wanted a Japanese knife. The shopkeeper was crouched behind the counter. The other potential customers and I stood outside, peering in. He peered back.
We were all waiting to discover whether the shop was actually open.
Nobody seemed prepared to be the first to find out.
He stayed crouched. We stayed outside.
It was a Mexican standoff, Japanese style, with tabi socks at stake.
Japan was proving to be brilliant and bonkers.
Sarah Tucker
The snow monkeys were less interested in performing for us
They live in the mountains above Shibu Onsen and appeared to regard tourists with the weary tolerance of people who have seen the same species arrive for decades carrying cameras.
By Osaka, I had begun to suspect that my carefully constructed categories were becoming a liability.
Our food tour took us through Tenma, where Tom ate and tried everything. Miso walnuts, yam croquettes, chicken stuffed with crab meat, and an astonishing assortment of dishes I would never have ordered simply because I would not have known what they were.
Tom did not need to know what something was before deciding to taste it.
I preferred research.
Our guide also corrected my pronunciation of arigatou gozaimasu after several increasingly inventive attempts.
I had travelled thousands of miles to discover that I could apparently not manage four syllables.
Sarah Tucker
Kyoto offered a different kind of bewilderment
At our tea ceremony, every movement had a purpose. Preparing the tea mattered as much as drinking it. The Japanese concept of ichigo ichie, one life, one meeting, seemed particularly apt. The encounter exists once, and therefore deserves attention.
Japan seemed remarkably good at attention.
Perhaps because it has not yet accepted that everything needs to be faster.
At teamLab Biovortex Kyoto, Tom was less concerned with whether what we were experiencing fitted the conventional definition of an art gallery.
“It’s the future of art galleries,” he said.
He had no particular need to put it in a box.
Neither did Nintendo, whose Kyoto origins were in playing cards. Tom was fascinated by the distance between that company and the one now responsible for entire digital universes.
Sarah Tucker
Then Hiroshima
The Peace Memorial Museum did not simply remind us what we must not forget. It confronted us with what we had already forgotten.
Tom noticed that too.
We both found it frustrating and disturbing. How can something so terrible become something we know about, remember in outline, and yet have somehow already forgotten in any meaningful sense?
Outside, people went to work. Children went to school. Streetcars moved through the city. Ferries carried passengers to Miyajima, where a couple was getting married.
Sarah Tucker
That coexistence was difficult to absorb.
On our final days, Japan continued to refuse easy categorisation.
Then it rained.
Tom noticed several older Japanese men without umbrellas and offered them his.
I was concentrating on staying dry.
He was concentrating on somebody else.
He had simply noticed something I had not.
I had spent years becoming good at travelling. I knew how to plan, navigate and anticipate. Tom had reminded me of something less practical and considerably more useful.
Look again.
Perhaps that is what Japan does at its best. It makes familiar things strange, strange things ordinary and experienced travellers question whether experience has made them wiser or merely more certain.
I arrived with a bucket list.
I left with fewer boxes.
And the slightly inconvenient realisation that I had not really been showing my son Japan.
He had been showing me how to see it.
