Found In Translation

It's funny how we tend to form our opinions, both positive and negative, about a place before we even go there. This is especially true with places we really want to visit. You might watch moves set in this place, or read books and look at photos set there, and before you know it, you've already been there. Or at least you've been to the “ideal form” of said place. Then if you're determined enough, you may actually finally make it there in person, all the while expecting it to be everything and more you had ever hoped. Sometimes you may find that it turns out to be more than you could have ever fathomed, and sometimes you may actually be let down. I always found that when I traveled, it was a strange mixture of both. But after the initial shock had worn off that I actually was wherever I was, one thing always came back to me: it isn't what you think it will be before you go, but rather what you make of it when you're there. I didn't know it at the time, but I had visited japan way before my first summer out of college in the summer of 2009. In fact, I had visited a multitude of different Japans numerous times before that.

When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do on any friday or saturday night was to go to the movies with my dad. We would see a plethora of different films. Sometimes we would go to a comedy, and watch Ben Stiller or Ryan Reynolds make fools of themselves, only to end up getting laid at the end. Other times we would see gangster films like the ones directed by Guy Ritchie, (to this day, the two of us fools still quote Snatch more than any other film in the history of cinema). It didn't seem to ever matter to me what flick we caught because I always trusted my pop's good taste in movies and knew that whatever we saw I would dig on some level. Funny thing is that I was pretty much always right about that; funnier thing was that I didn't know just how right I was. In the fall and winter of 2003, we went to two movies in the theaters that would change the course of my young life far more than either my old man or I could have ever known. Those movies were Kill Bill, and Lost In Translation, respectively.

First I witnessed in a state of what I can only describe as pure boyhood ecstasy as I watched Uma Thurman kill her way through a yakuza-filled Japan in the blood-soaked hack 'n slash story of one very pissed off bride. Next came the story of Bob Harris and his young companion Charlotte as they sleeplessly traversed the sprawling dollhouse of a metropolis that is Tokyo, both as stranded in their own existential crises as they were in the city, due to their apparent inability to communicate with the locals. As I watched these two films, a little seed in my head started to grow more rapidly than kudzu, as it was nourished by the almost photosynthetic rays of neon light being emitted by the images of tokyo that flashed before me on the silver screen. In movie terms, Sophia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino performed real-life inception in my young and impressionable mind, without me ever even falling asleep.

Now fast forward 7 years, two trips, five 14-hour plane rides, and a whole cluster-fuck of foreign films, documentaries, guide books, and photo albums in between and here I sit again, writing another blog post as another new day begins full of promise and the undying curiosity with which to soak it up like a sponge, and I can't help but think about the closed-minded dispositions of poor Charlotte and Bob in Coppola's own Japanese lovechild. If only they could have stopped feeling sorry for themselves long enough to look up at any given point to notice the unbelievable amount of potential around them, maybe they could have skipped all the self-important bullshit and started enjoying themselves way sooner. But then again, truth be told I was once guilty of the same thing, and only later did I realize that as beautiful of a place as this can be, it will only be as beautiful as you let it.

Ha, guess it turns out I'm as dialogue-heavy as Tarantino. You proud dad? Wish you were here to see what I see dude. After all, this IS partially your fault