Coming home

They say you can’t go home again. “Home” holds countless meanings for different people. It’s the family that raised you. It’s the house that you grew up in. It’s the town or city that helped shape and define you. But above all else, home is the place where you feel you belong, where you’re supposed to be. Home is a seemingly easy concept to understand. Everyone has a home, or at least the idea of what one feels like. The word itself serves as a unique connection to nostalgia and memory. For me, home is Tokyo, the place where I was born and where I lived for 11 years before arriving at Duke. Over the past three years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go back, to spend time with my parents and friends in the city that I’ve come to love. When I was little, I sometimes resented having to grow up outside of the United States, in a place that was so different, so foreign. Nowadays I can’t believe I ever thought that way, or that I ever wished for a life different from the one I had as a child.

I’m home now. At least, that’s what I thought when I got off the plane a week ago. There are many things about Tokyo that haven’t changed in the time I’ve been away. Trains still run like clockwork. Schoolchildren still wear matching hats and backpacks. The food is still amazing, and the city lights are still bright. It feels the same. When I went out with some friends the other night, it felt just like a night out during my high school days. (Except for the lack of anxiety over being carded—legitimate legality is awesome.) Moments and experiences like that make me feel like nothing has changed.

But Tokyo is not the same place I left three years ago. A quarter of the buildings currently in my neighborhood didn’t exist when I left for college. Many families that I knew growing up have moved away, because of either work-related obligations or the combination of shaking earth, raging water and a government too inept to prevent a nuclear disaster and too unwilling to tell its people how bad things actually were. The society as a whole seems a little more tentative, a little less sure about what the future holds.

Some places that I used to know well have changed, too. Walking back into my high school made those three years feel more like three decades. Sure, my teachers remembered me and asked how I was doing, and the building itself was more or less the same. But the students were all strangers, kids fleshing out their awkwardness and insecurities so that their true selves could really shine through in college. Or something like that. Going back to that school made me feel old and out of place, like a guy who’s overstayed his welcome. I probably won’t visit any time soon, at least not until no one remembers me as “that guy who keeps coming back.”

I’m back in Tokyo. But this home isn’t the home I left when I was 18. It’s as if I left a wonderful house that didn’t seem to have any issues, only to come back and find renovations underway, with more to follow. Places change, as do the people and societies that occupy them. Some things that were will never be again—I know this implicitly. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to reclaim the place I remember; the fact that I never will is a testament to the enormous impact that other people have on one’s own experiences. Duke wouldn’t be Duke for me or anyone else without the people who fill it up with everything they think, do and hope for. So it is with this marvelous city that is unlike any other. I suspect that, as time passes and my family eventually moves away, Tokyo will become a collection of memories I reflect on, instead of a place I come back to. Memories I hope can sustain me for the years to come, when crossing the Pacific won’t be an option. I suppose that I can’t really go home again, at least not in the physical sense. But the place I’m in now is pretty damn close, which is good enough for me.

Jordan Siedell is a Trinity senior.