Japan has always been a place I’ve wanted to visit. At the end of my eighth-grade year, I was offered the opportunity to take a Japanese language and culture class. It was new and different, and I felt special being given the opportunity, so I took it.
I 
continued studying it throughout high school and completed the two required years in college. Sadly, I remember very little of the language.
However, I do remember being intrigued by certain aspects of Japanese culture. Most notably, I liked the focus on working as a group for almost everything. I appreciated the collective commitment to the health of the group as a whole. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I liked that. I was then—and am very much now—an introvert, preferring to do things on my own most of the time.
Just thinking about working in a group gives me anxiety; there are too many feelings and other people’s concerns to navigate. After visiting Japan, though, I now see that working as a group in Japan is a completely different experience than doing so in the United States.
Navigating the City as a Family
My little tribe visited Japan in September. After landing at Narita Airport, we arranged a service to deliver our luggage to our hotel so we could catch the train to Chiyoda City, Tokyo, without the hassle of carrying bags. Despite not speaking the language, we were able to set that up without any issues.
Navigating the train system was also fairly seamless. All the signage included English translations, so we were able to catch the necessary trains and make our way through the maze of Tokyo subways with little difficulty. It didn’t take long to notice how calm it was moving through the subways. Of course, there was plenty of activity, with walkways and subway cars teeming with people, but there was no harried energy. There was no hum of anxious circumspection vibrating throughout. It felt safe. Those are the words I come to now and came to often while we were in Japan—I felt safe.
It Felt Safe
After hearing so many people share how safe it felt there, maybe that’s why it felt
safe to me. Perhaps, after so many conversations with travelers extolling the low crime rate and the sight of children walking to school unattended, it had permeated my mind, and I just adopted that notion. I won’t deny that possibility, entirely. Knowing myself, though, and knowing my fairly dependable ability to read a room, I don’t believe it was just a matter of confirmation bias. I kept waiting for that familiar feeling of worry and caution to kick in—checking faces and watching body language, ready to return to my usual alert status. But that moment never came.
I was able to simply be. I enjoyed being a tourist without fear of being seen as an easy mark. With our luggage on its way to the hotel, I was free from both literal and figurative baggage. Like a big kid, I was taking videos with the kids, snapping photos, and just soaking it all in. Granted this is my first visit to Japan and I was there on vacation. Visiting somewhere on vacation makes for a very different mindset than one might have when living in a place. However, I noticed after being there a few days that everyone took great care to be mindful of others around.
