The main goal of my trip was to learn Japanese. I must really have bought into the concept of slow travel because I have been learning for 3 years prior, learned some basic things during my stay and plan many more visits until I have mastered the language which harbors incredible cultural treasures. All in all this might well become a decade long project that I won’t be able to replicate with every country out there but that’s okay. Just this one trip gave me more memories than most of my travels I did in my 20s and I’m convinced this is the right way to go. Going into the country whose language you are learning is an incredible thing to do but I believe you have to be close to conversational fluency to get the most out of it. When you cannot speak quickly enough, locals will just switch to english or understand by non verbal means what you are trying to say and this is especially true in Japan where people go out of their way to be as polite and helpful as possible. I thought I was ready for that but it turned out I was still a bit too slow for most conversations, which doesn’t mean I didn’t learn a lot. At first you don’t understand anything, like can’t even order a coffee. The first couple of days I tried that, correctly order a coffee, have a meal at a restaurant, which a friend helped me with, go to the supermarket etc. It is an incredible feeling to go from smiling idiot to fluently uttering the couple of phrases necessary and a real boost to morale. Of course the real benefit comes from being constantly bombarded by japanese script, warnings, advertisement, announcements, pieces of chatter and basic conversation because somehow your brain switches to automation mode, where even if you don’t understand everyting you hear, you emulate rhythm, intonation, contextual meaning. You remember new words and phrases by remembering the places and situations where you encountered them, especially well if you were a bit embarassed that you couldn’t respond properly the first time. You also learn culture. This was a first for me because Japanese is my first language from outside the European cultural tradition and I didn’t have to think about this before. But when I learned italian for example, I did not have to learn vocabulary of philosophy or art or other areas of interest so much, because I know the corresponding words in other languages which almost always have the same origin, latin or greek. In Japanese I found that I can hardly talk about anything because abstract words have different origins. Whats more, Japanese has utterly different concepts of thought that are unfamiliar to me. I only encountered a few so far, but in these cases you have to learn the words, very often some historical or artistic origin and an entire way of thinking, which is difficult and takes time. It is my default style of travel now and works particularly well for language acquisition too: Meetup. People share all kinds of stuff about their home, things they like, well known and lesser known aspects of the real, non touristy world they inhabit and generally do this in a mix of languages because they want to connect as well. Depending on your level you can very quickly get into conversations with locals, either entirely in japanese, talking about japanese things or your own world or at least learn a couple of new words and phrases in each new conversation like i did. I realize this might be scary and I myself would not have done it even a few years back because you basically have to accept the role of the idiot. You won’t speak, let alone well, you won’t get points across, be witty or worldly, in other words you won’t be shaping any kind of situation but that’s how it goes, you’re here to learn the language after all, which is impressive by itself and people will greet this endevour with respect and reward it with sharing authentic tidbits of their private lives. In general I feel one should travel to meet and make friends and approach everybody accordingly. This is even truer for language learning because you have to speak, the more the better and so everybody is welcome in your time. I have spent entire weeks just talking and dining and feel more connected to this beautiful culture than ever before. I also learned about my next goals, things to work for. Like Noh and Kabuki which are difficult, even for native speakers, maybe akin to opera in Europe, which has been normal for me almost since childhood, maybe because I’m austrian, maybe because music has been important to my family, but I know nothing of the japanese equivalent and I only perceived this challenge trying to decypher the program in Ginza’s Kabuki-za and repeatedly hearing in conversation with young and old that they basically all go to a kabuki play once or twice in their lives and then let it be. I can’t accept that and now feel challenged. Same for Noh. Then there is Yose which I didn’t know at all but is right up my alley because it is perforance of the art of speech. In Europe there is cabaret and theater, arts which I personally don’t like so much but I do like their manner of speech which is highly inventive and rhetoric and found it’s way into the common language on multiple occasions. Poetry in general is normal for me in european languages, as an opus operandi, not so much as a rigid form of expression, language basically exists to be changed in insightful ways and again I find myself challenged by Japanese where I cannot even imagine yet how one does it. I want to be able to learn from the masters and then infuse my own language with the same playfulness I’m used to in European languages. And then there is architecture and rituals and those artists you only see in a small museum in Kamakura even the locals have never been to and and and… I hate being confronted with things about which I don’t know basically anything and in Japan it happened every minute. I have become very arrogant only running around Europe because even if there is a great diversity of culture of which I’m certainly no expert, I’ve had the feeling that I just got the gist of it. It made me disappointed and ultimately lazy. Japan is a culture sufficiently different for me to care again.