Inner Musings from Tokyo : January 2021

As I complete 1 year in Japan this February, we thought to start a monthly series about Japan; its daily life, its culture, its food, its unique aspects, its positives & sometimes even its negatives.

In this series, “Tokyo Musings”, we will share our thoughts, knowledge, experiences, and insights from Japan with our readers. After staying for a year, possibly I think I understand and know Japan a little better than as I knew as a tourist traveling to Japan…

With a base career in India, I have been traveling to Japan for 2 decades now and it had been only short visits of not more than 3 weeks. Again, in February 2020, I traveled to Tokyo from Mumbai for a 2 weeks trip to visit my family here and then Covid19 happened and I got locked in Japan!

It was a difficult thought process – I requested the company for remote working. And, after working in Japan for a couple of months, I decided to resign from my India job. Conventionally I would have never thought of taking a sabbatical this way, with no monthly income, however in a situation when travel was not like before and was restricted both in Japan and even back in India, I decided to stay with family.

During the pandemic uncertainty, when all the orders went into the haze, we started a Japan content-based Facebook page on 21 March 2020, falling on a long weekend spent at home. I also started to make videos from the footage collected during several trips to Japan.

Capturing the daily life and beauty of Japan and sharing it with the people made me realize how lucky I was to get stuck in Japan. It amazed me, how people around the world love and appreciate Japanese culture, daily life, and food! For lots of people, it is a dream to visit Japan.

And, as I write this post during the 2nd emergency in Japan, I come to know that some have been saving monthly for more than a year for that one trip to Japan. Some are praying that the travel restrictions get lifted soon for them to make that one trip to Japan. I also realized many things about Japan once I started staying here – We as a family too felt deeply grateful to be living here.

The pandemic year brought many challenges for us and even brought many realizations that possibly would have been hard to realize without the Pandemic – That’s how the “Musings” came up…

There were many realizations but some of the key realizations from 2020, as we progress into 2021 is worth a mention.

1. Love more – Not just people or things, but primarily yourself. Many of life’s problems result from a lack of self-love.
2. Make a community outside the people you know – Connecting with people enriches lives.
3. We mistake security for happiness – Let go of worry, fear, and anxiety.
4. When you are open to receiving, possibilities keep coming – Attitude is everything.
5. Undertake regular self-improvement – Continuous skill development is a must.

We are already down one month in 2021, and with February already here – it’s time for us to look forward to the rest of February.

With this thought, let’s keep calm and love Japan…

Let me stop this blog by sharing some photographs of how we began 2021 – Hope you all had a great beginning of 2021.