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Furusato ふるさと (n.) A Japanese term for one’s hometown, not simply the place where you are from, but the place your heart longs for.

Jeremy and I have not had a “home” of any kind for a year, sleeping under a new sky and in a new bed with every changing day, week, or month. I would peer up, every evening, to a fresh patchwork of stars, a raw cluster of constellations… Same same, but different, as the Thai would say. I realize now I can be content under any arrangement of stars; home isn’t only a place, but a state of mind.

I am beginning to sculpt a mysterious, yet familiar city as my own, slowly but surely. Patience yields everything, and everything takes time. I walk through the same front door everyday, murkily wake up to a sea of ceramic-tiled rooftops reflecting beams of sunrise every morning, and marvel at the brightness of Venus from the balcony of our apartment every night.

Our day-to-day life here is unlike any conventional routine I’ve ever known before; grocery shopping while using Google Translate for every label, walking and riding trains as my only means of transportation, purchasing my morning coffee or tea via vending machine, and piecing together foreign syllables while bowing during every interaction. We eat rice everyday out of our Wall-E-esque rice cooker with buttons defined only in Kanji characters. Kanji, in fact, distinguishes every button in our apartment, and there are a lot of them.

You can press one button to automatically run a bath that is set to your desired temperature and water volume, followed with a song that is cheerfully sung to you when your bath is ready. You can press another when your doorbell is rung to start and end a video conference with anyone outside your front door. You can press one to transform your bathroom into a dehumidifier and dryer for your clothes, since the Japanese still prefer to hang-dry their laundry. You can press another for the designated fish grill to automatically sear a perfectly pink cut of fleshy tuna. You can press one to set your preferred toilet seat-warming strength to low, medium, or high, alongside the other 4 buttons decorating a masterfully-equipped bidet system. Our home is a spectacle of sophisticated and streamlined buttons, technology with a clever and plush purpose, a standard of living found in nearly every Japanese home.

We, without question, remove our shoes and slide into slippers every single time we enter our home. I take baths nearly as much as I shower, my fingertips pruning in our deep, Japanese tub. We drink several types of green tea, evolving into a daily habit I enjoy as much as my morning coffee. We sit on the floor during our meals, almost like an indoor picnic, perched with upright posture to our low-set furniture. We place our palms together and bow our heads while taking a moment of gratitude to say, “Itadakimasu” before digging into a home-cooked meal. Our intention is not to live as Americans in Japan. Jeremy and I are openly embracing a Japanese way of life now, even if we miss a good ol’ neighborhood pizza from time to time.

I came across a new word called Ma. Ma is a Japanese expression and philosophy applying to every aspect of life, signifying a celebration not of things, but the space between them. Ma is clearing one’s home of an overabundance of stuff, expanding space amongst the minimal, bringing deeper meaning to what remains. Ma is the empty space existing in a song, the silence between the notes. Ma is the quiet interlude from the chaos of a day, stilling the noise. When we crowd our closets, cram our cabinets, and clutter our homes, everything loses value. When we congest our days with busy schedules without making room to pause or to breathe deeply, everything loses purpose. Ma is the emptiness between all things; it is the negative space highlighting that which is meaningful.

Lately, I feel as though I’m existing in the space between. I am a foreigner residing in a country that is not my own, and yet, Japan pulls me to it like a gentle tide to shore. I have ties to this ancient island. Ancestors of mine carved the branching paths of their lives upon this country, and my father spent his childhood under its cherry blossoms, catching bugs in the summertime heat.

Maybe I’ve always had furusato for Japan. I have longed for this place before I even knew I did.

Cheers,

Tera