well, it's been about a year now since i returned from my epic two-month trip to japan... when i wrote my trip wrap-up post earlier this year, i was still reluctant to make any definite judgment of the trip, but now i'm willing to declare it: it was a huge success, and i successfully maintained my flawless streak of every japan trip being better than the last.

the funny thing is, that trip got off to such a slow and inauspicious start that if you'd asked me during it even three weeks in, at the time i would have said that it was largely a disappointment so far... i can barely account for what i did the first couple weeks... probably lounging around the airbnb because it was so humid out, going to denny's, prowling akiba as always. i hate to blame my friends but it was as soon as i got free of them that stuff really started happening - comiket, the kyushu trip, the crazy tower... then, once the airbnb lapsed and everyone left except for the one friend i'd convinced to stay an extra week, things really kicked into high gear: walking up usui pass, renting a car, karaoke at the remote noto peninsula curry joint, the tateyama-kurobe alpine route. after my friend left, i languished in matsumoto for a few days then continued on into the disastrous nakasendo hike, making my way up the tokaido, the choushi trip with shibs, and then wrapping up with spelunking in tohoku... a spectacular highlight reel. besides the experiences, i got some good shopping done during the trip too - i bolstered my manga library on the cheap, found every nendoroid i was looking for, and even stumbled upon cool things i didn't even know you could buy, like old anime promotional posters or the destination placards from trains. finally, the trip was of course also exceptionally generative artistically (perhaps too much so), i ended up writing a total of ~70k words about it, easily my longest sustained writing project ever...

however, none of those are goals that i'd outlined for the trip in my post announcing it... going in, there was only really one thing i was hoping the trip would do: help me escape The Rut. in the weeks leading up to it, i invested a lot in the trip mentally, transforming it from just a long-overdue return into a final desperate gambit to provide a sufficient shock to my system and/or lifestyle to get out of the stagnation i'd been feeling after not really making any progress on anything in years...

it's now been long enough that i can look back at what's happened since the trip and judge whether i succeeded in that goal, too... i barely have to think to answer: absolutely. it's actually incredible how much i turned things around this past year, it's the start of a new personal era, and it all happened so quickly that i still find it hard to believe myself... i have new friends, new motivations... i conquered my anxieties and finally made a modest debut in the bay area and on substack, twitter, youtube (ok this one i don't care about so much), and so on...

i've discussed this before, but my motivations for hanging around this remote outpost of the net are different from most... others come to escape social media, i came to hide from it. all this time, though, i've yearned for social media... for a while now i've been cautiously optimistic about the benefits you can reap if you use the right platforms in the right waysthough perhaps this is only because i never seriously used them myself... who knows, maybe you'll find me crawling back here in a couple years saying the same things everyone else does...... substack is almost singlehandedly fueling a blogging renaissance that's made making a living as an independent writer online actually seem attainable, and on X Formerly Twitter i've seen people post their way into friends, community, jobs, even marriage (and of course, in the past i've gone on the record defending the tweet as an emerging aphoristic artform). but for years i've been too scared to partake and just lurked, telling myself that i need to keep grinding in the low-level tutorial area (here) until i'm ready. that is of course absolutely unnecessary, regular people with absolutely no training or qualifications start posting online all the time, it was just an excuse to keep hiding because i was scared of attention and judgement from "serious" people... but after the japan trip i got over those anxieties and did it, finally entered the game as a live player...

now, i will admit it is a little difficult to say for sure that the turnaround was a direct outcome of the japan trip, after all it's not like i upended everything the second i got back home... the true pivotal moment was several months later, when i hit submit on my inkhaven application in late february, also preceded by much rumination and gnashing of teeth and a minor escapade i'm tentatively calling "Valentine's Vibebus: Oahu" that i may or may not eventually write up. to be fair, though, inkhaven was pretty much the first promising opportunity i came across after returning from the trip, so in those intervening months maybe i really was biding my time waiting for something to come my way, instead of just continuing to spin my wheels as i had been...

oh yes, i should also mention that the title of this post ("nippon, revisited") is meant literally as well: