From One Room to the World

Ten years ago, I was living in Tokyo in a soundproofed apartment built for musicians, going back and forth every day between an office in Minami-Aoyama and a grand piano. One summer night, the thought came to me that this soundproofed room might be the whole of my life, and it made me unbearably sad.

The woman I was living with at the time was my exact opposite. Gifted with languages and endlessly curious, she had been going out to places all over the world since she was young, and the thing she always had in her hand was a camera.

Until then, I had never touched a camera or taken a photograph.

She kept telling me to go, and something began to smolder in me, the feeling that I ought to see the world once with my own eyes.

The first trip was to Amami Oshima, alone. On a cape there, I took a photograph with a camera I had borrowed from her. That was the first photograph of my life, and it was the first step toward the person I am today.

The reason was nothing admirable. She was buried in study for a national exam, and she had asked me to send her pictures of the beautiful scenery I saw. That was all it was. The first frame was a sunset going down over Amami Oshima.

From there, in step with the upheavals of the world, my life began to turn sharply. If you become a world class pianist, flying around the globe is simply daily life, and there really are wonderful pianists who live that way. I did not have that ability. So I quit everything.

I gave up my life in Tokyo, gave up the work, gave up the piano, and in the end I reset my relationships as well.

What was left was my own body and one camera I had bought. From there, the days of crossing the sea began. It was winter, and my twenty-sixth year was coming to an end.

After that, as if to act out the phrase “from a single room to the world,” I kept putting myself in one place after another.

The sun going down into the Arabian Sea after more than a month in Goa. The humidity of the Philippines. The last anti-Brexit march in London, where more than a million people filled the streets. I traveled through the American states where cannabis had been legalized and kept pressing the shutter at the front line of 420, I ran around the small islands of the Mediterranean, and in the dead of winter I flew north toward the biohacking that was beginning in the Nordic countries.

After I came back from London, I was thinking of moving to Finland, and then the pandemic arrived. It turned my thinking around, and this time I went deep into Japan instead. It is hard to believe now, but I stayed two weeks in a silent Kyoto and passed rich hours with my eyes quietly closed inside famous temples where there was no one at all.

When Britain became the first country to announce that it was reopening its borders, I went to London, across Egypt, to Amsterdam, and through Italy, while the shadow of the pandemic still lay heavy over the rest of the world. After coming home, I went deep into Japan again, and the days of visiting Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, and Korea continued.

Looking back, I think the fortunate thing may have been that from the moment I decided to travel, I never let the camera out of my hands. If the photographs did not exist, the memory would be only inside my head, and in the age of AI, someone could call it a lie. In the age of generative AI, a photograph becomes the fact that I was certainly there.

Human beings are well made. My curiosity keeps moving on and I grow bored easily, probably because I carry genes with a strong drive toward novelty. As if to balance that, I was given a gift for writing. No amount of writing tires me. Writing is introspection, and introspection puts out new shoots from inside a person. Or rather, I simply like introspection.

Even as generative AI is built into our daily lives, life may become a little richer so long as I have the photographs I took myself and the power to put into language the firsthand material I gathered by going to places and thinking. After all, the AI will do the rest.

That is what I was thinking, and since social media has never suited me, I decided to start a blog of my own.