One of the most fascinating things that I have learned about myself while travelling around is the kind of home that I’d like to keep. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons why I really wanted to spend time in Japan. For years before this moment, I have been watching lifestyle influencers from here and imagining myself in a Japanese home. Even though I don’t see myself living here long term, I want to keep aspects of this way of life for myself.
Of course, not living with a Japanese person, I cannot really understand yet the way in which they live. But that doesn’t stop me from building my own authentic experience with what is presented in front of me. I must start with the little things first. I have been placed in a foreign country, where even the simplest things bring about the biggest headaches. For this reason, it tend to postpone doing basic things like going to the supermarket, washing my clothes or taking out the rubbish… they are not as simple as they would be for me in Australia. I need to take each task in stages. First I must translate everything, then I carry it out to the best of my ability and then I hope for the best.
I have already taken my first trip to the supermarket, it was a bit of a disorienting experience. But I can’t eat snacks from Family Mart forever. I didn’t want to gravitate towards the things that are familiar to me, I wanted to give Japanese style cooking a go, even if I failed at it. My friends re-assured me that Japanese cooking was easy, so after some research I made a list of basic sauces and ingredients used to make simple dishes. Doing the research started to stress me out, because I didn’t really know if I had collected all the data that I needed. Perfectionism always hopes to get it right the first time. But after a few days, I couldn’t stall anymore. I forgot to translate my list into Japanese, and I just put on my backpack and went out the door. The cure to perfectionism is always to just do it and break the ice… show yourself that failure doesn’t matter.
It turns out that I only remembered the need to translate my list of ingredients when I arrived at the shopping centre without the internet. So I was left having to stare at various types of meat and sauces and guess what they were. It was certainly a different experience to what I knew in other countries. Everything was packed in small quantities, making it easy to buy just enough for a single person household like mine. You can buy a pack of 6 potatoes, two small slices of salmon, two tiny pieces of chicken breast. The bread here comes cut into thick slices, and you can buy four per loaf. After France, I was so used to seeing aisles and aisles of cheese, yoghurt and butter… in Japan, I could hardly find the dairy section.
The seafood section however was vast and immaculate. Perfect little pieces of fish and pretty boxes of sushi and sashimi. It had been a long time since I’d had the pleasure of eating raw fish, so I took a box of sashimi home, with a tube of wasabi, to have for dinner. What started off as something intimidating, ended up becoming a fun exercise and I became consumed in the task of finding what I needed. When I finally dragged my heavy basket to the counter, I began to be worried – how was I going to pack this all in time? I forgot that in Japan you don’t need to worry about that.
If you can trust Japan for one thing, it’s that they have already taken care of the little daily details of life, so that every person has a comfortable experience. After you pay for your items, there is a specific packing area so that you can pack your items in peace. No more rushing to shove things in my bag as the person behind me judges the speed in which I do it. That comfort is taken into the home too. In Japan, there are little appliances for everything. Every household has a rice cooker, a hangiri or wooden container for after the rice is cooked, a tamagoyaki pan for omelettes, ladles of all shapes and sizes, a grilling pan for toasting things on the stove, a little toaster oven and much, much more.
In my apartment, I have bowls for rice, bowls for sauce, bowls for vegetables, bowls for ramen, cups for tea, cups for coffee, glasses for juices and ceramic mugs for beer. All of this, and my pantry does not appear to be overflowing with clutter. How do they do it? It makes me think… perhaps I have spent my life looking for multi-purpose items and complaining about the mediocre results that these items give me so much that I need to buy new things. Clutter builds up, and at the end of it all I am still unhappy.
Maybe the Japanese way is to be as specific as possible. That old logic of if you take care of the pennies, then the pounds will take care of themselves. If I look after the little details in my life, then I can let the bigger problems solve themselves. Perhaps this is good not only to bring about a sense of relaxation, but it can also be a functional way of living. I can’t help thinking that the ideal lifestyle in Japan is telling me the same one thing: stop, breathe, and turn your attention to the seemingly insignificant things of every day life.
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