The Beginning

心のままに生きることが一番の幸せ

To live according to your heart is the greatest happiness

So we begin, as they say, at the beginning.

What is my name? What is my quest? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I can convincingly answer at least two of these questions, and as for the third, I can promise you, dear reader, that that will be the last Python quote.

What is my name?

My name is Chris Perry, and for as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by Japan. People have different paths when it comes to developing affection for the land of the rising sun, some follow popular culture, anime, manga, and the like. For others, it is Martial Arts, Karate, Judo, and Kendo being popular across the world and all have their origins here.

For me, however, it was the history. I will admit from the off that my passion for history has always bordered on the obsessive. I consume historical facts as though my life depends on it, and from the moment I learned to read, I have absorbed information from sources as wide-ranging as the Horrible History series (the books, that is, the TV show, excellent though it is, came along later) to obscure Wikipedia articles about battles fought in places long-forgotten.

Like many boys, I developed an early and somewhat morbid fascination with World War 2. Growing up in Britain, with grandparents who were young people themselves during those years, I was surrounded by stories of the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, El-Alamein, and D-day, and the vague but absolute certainty that the British were the good guys and the Germans were dastardly blackguards, who got what they deserved.

So it begins…

It was Britain’s other enemy, however, that really drew my interest. For a child growing up in the mid-90s, when having a PC at home, let alone the internet, was considered cutting-edge, Japan might as well have been on Saturn for all I knew about it and an understanding of Japanese history and culture? Forget about it.

So, you can imagine the fascination that came when I first learned about Kamikaze. How was it, I wondered, that men could be so fanatically devoted to their cause that they would willingly fly their planes into American warships? The answer, I found, was Bushido.

There will be time enough to discuss the ins and outs of the Japanese warrior code, but in those far-off days, it was the Samurai that captured my imagination. Of course, at that age, I quickly developed a rather stereotypical image of them: stoic, invincible warriors, utterly fearless, and possessing swords that were halfway to being magical. Years of reading have long since done away with those ideas, but I’d be lying if I said the appeal and mystique of the Samurai has ever really left me.

I read anything I could get my hands on, and by the time my teens arrived, I considered myself the ‘expert’ on all things Samurai. I was, of course, woefully mistaken, but one of the beauties of being a teenager is the opportunity to be confidently wrong, and I was no different.

Then came Shogun: Total War. A video game, yes, but one set in the period that I loved best; I was hooked, to say the least. I played it religiously, and although a video game is a poor substitute for historical research, it exposed me to the characters, events, and geography of medieval Japan in a way that nothing else had.

Musashi, Hizen, Mutsu, and dozens of others were words that meant nothing to me, but Nagasaki, Tokyo, and Fukushima? These names I could understand, and so, slowly, I learned to trace the historical events to their modern locations, and my fascination only grew.

First Steps

My first trip to Japan came in April 2006, and alongside my father, I was finally able to see these mystical places in person. We went to Tokyo, of course, and Hiroshima, but we also visited Nikko, a small town nestled in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture, home to the Edo-Mura outdoor museum, a place where the Edo period (1603-1868) is brought to life.

Like so many others, I left Japan with a reverence for the place that went far beyond what I had expected, and as soon as I could, I returned, this time alone, revisiting many of the places I had been to previously, and uncovering a few new ones as well. (On this trip, I decided to walk through the infamous Kabukicho neighbourhood in Tokyo and discovered I wasn’t as brave as I’d thought.)

When I went to university, I made it my mission to learn the language as best I could (a mission that is still ongoing nearly 20 years later), but in 2010, I was fortunate enough to get a place as a foreign exchange student at Daito Bunka University in Saitama, and I arrived in Japan for the third time.

Anyone who has ever been an international student can tell you that it is a unique experience, and I enjoyed it. However, my time was cut short by the events of March 2011, when a major earthquake and tsunami struck Fukushima. Although Saitama was far from danger (though not violent shaking), my home university erred on the side of caution and brought us all home.

There are rarely straight roads anywhere in life, and this setback was a blow but one I recovered from. Upon graduating in the summer of 2012, I made it my mission to return to Japan for the fourth (and, as it turned out, final) time.

There and Back Again…

On August 31st, 2012, I returned to Japan, securing work at an International preschool in Western Tokyo. By the time I moved on in 2015, I had met the woman who would become my wife; we married in 2016 and welcomed our first child in 2017, followed by our second in 2020.

And so we come to, as the great poet Homer (Simpson) once called it, “the lousy, stinking now”, and to the answer to the second question, “What is my quest?”

The answer to that is two-fold; first, I want to share with you all my obsession love of Japanese history; can I claim to know everything? No. Can I claim to research everything I write carefully? Eh…a bit. Look, full disclosure: I’m not a professional historian. I’m an amateur at best, but a more enthusiastic amateur you’ll never meet, so I can at least promise that I’ll never intentionally mislead for personal, political, or professional gain. If I make a mistake, I’ll do my best to correct it.

As to the second part? Well, that’s a bit trickier, you see, in the post-covid world, with tourism skyrocketing in Japan again, I’ve noticed a worrying trend on places like Tik-Tok, Instagram, and other Social Media sights in which earnest young people will tell you “Ten things you must never do in Japan,” only for them to then list things I see Japanese doing all the time. It is my humble intention to help you discover what Japan is, what it isn’t, and how you can experience Japan in a way that will leave your wonder intact while keeping the locals reasonably happy.

So, we begin. Good Luck, Everyone.