01

Preface

I’ve lived in Japan twice, the first time when I was a kid in the late 1980s, and the second time when I was an adult in the mid-2000s. To say it left an impression on me is an understatement. Send Me Back To Japan is something that I wrote in the couple years after returning to the U.S. I was still in the glow of the time I had spent there. It’s something I could have only written in that moment, and purposefully I don’t want to edit it or mess with it now, to preserve those feelings of enchantment I felt then. It’s a little window back to the past, and I wouldn’t be able to write it now. I would only muck it up. Although, in many ways I still have all the same feelings I felt then, though not with the same dizzying intensity. Time, and age, changes things. But any time I read this, I am transported back to this time of youth, and passion. And each time I visit Japan now, I feel a version of the same effect I felt then, although it is different. Nothing is ever exactly the same when you go back, because it is not just the place that you miss, it is that time in your life, and the things you were feeling then.

Without further ado, here is Send Me Back To Japan, in all of its unfiltered glory, when I was in the glow of just having returned from living in Japan for a couple years (it was written mostly in 2008, probably—hence the Lost references). I hope everyone gets to experience something like I did, at least once in their life.