Have you noticed, that eventually, you will bump into the best guys again?
I mean those people you meet on your travels and wonder if you ever see again.
Then you meet them on the other side of the world
in the most surprising ways.
This time, in Nagoya, Japan, there were fewer surprises.
If we don’t count in kind of adapting “our son”.
In addition to meeting old or semi-old friends, we also found new ones.
An intriguing combination of new and old.
That is what Japan is anyway.
Where to find interviewees?
We have made friends with Stefan in Nara and we are wondering if we will see each other again.
And where in the world that would happen?
And when, if ever.
Our work in Nara is finished.
Ismo and I continue our journey to Osaka, Stefan to his home in Nagoya.
We are waiting for a response from a couple of factories to our interview requests.
Companies seem to be playing time.
In Japan, people are a bit introverted in some matters, maybe protected would be the correct word to describe it.
I love Japan, its culture, and the Japanese people.
But it’s not always an easy place to work as a journalist.
It’s understandable, especially when the topic is work-related.
After all, Japan’s fast-paced working life has mostly been written in the West in a negative tone.
The suicides of salarymen dedicated to their work have been a topic not only in the West but also in Japan in recent years.
How to convince the locals that we are trying to prove the opposite improvement?
Anyhow, many young people no longer want to sacrifice themselves for their careers like their fathers.
Work leads us to Nagoya
We are talking about positive examples of work, but still, a couple of months is not enough to persuade most supervisors to agree to an interview.
However, no one wants to refuse directly.
So, as Christmas approaches, companies will reply to us that, unfortunately, the interviews will not be possible, because the factory staff would already be on Christmas vacation.
We need to find new contacts.
Our clients are pushing.
Where would you find one around Christmas?
We are leaving Japan already in January. There is no time to waste.
We’ve been messaging Stefan, whom we’ve met in Nara, and when we tell him about our minor problem and what we’re looking for, he drops a positive bomb:
“Why didn’t you ask, I work for a company where the management culture is significantly different and modern!”
Stefan’s boss responds to the interview request immediately: Of course, I’m available.
He is proud to make it to a Finnish magazine and it seems that the interview will also be good evidence for his father, as his father has been a little suspicious of his new management style.
This would be a win-win!
We take the train to Nagoya.
It has been almost four years since our last visit to this skyscraped city.
Nagoya cats – a couple of new friends
We already have an arrangement in Nagoya for an interior design magazine article gig at the home of a huge Finland fan Yuri Kaneko.
Yuri runs an Instagram account Yurikissa, whose name derives from her last name: “Neko” which means cat in Japanese, “kissa” means cat in Finnish.
We arrive at our Airbnb apartment from Nagoya train station after a local train ride and a little wandering around.
We find the keys to the apartment in the mailbox locked with a code and finally get to settle into the house.
We open the door in the dark.
Someone laughs in a robotic voice in the dark hallway. I almost had a heart attack.
The culprit turns out to be a toy cat, which has only repeated my laughter.
Playing with a toy cat that imitates sounds becomes a lot of fun for us.
I blame it for parroting, to which the furred robot replies with a nod: “Parrot!”.
The apartment itself is huge by Japanese standards.
Its living room can accommodate up to eleven people on sofas that can also be spread out.
We feel like staying in a mansion.
Especially since we’ve been living in small rented rooms for the last couple of years and built our home on bunk beds in hostels.
Not that our former Finnish studio apartment was too big either.
We stay in this rental apartment in Nagoya for nine nights.
Such a long-term accommodation is rare in Japan, and perhaps that is why our landlord invites us to a restaurant dinner one evening.
Catwoman wants to serve us a nice meal.
Adopting our son Stefan
Stefan is waiting at the metro station and leads us to his workplace to meet his boss.
As we pass through his office towards the CEO’s room with a view, we greet all the employees.
There is another English speaker among the Japanese.
The Australian dude politely says hello to us and continues “Oh, Stefan, I didn’t know your parents were visiting!”
This is how we got our son.
I couldn’t quite become a teenage mother, after all, I had already given birth to our son at the age of eleven.
Of course, we are proud to have succeeded in raising a son taller than us and even speaking native English.
Also the boss is so excited about our meeting that he wants to invite us to spend the evening at his favorite bar.
It’s a very nice evening indeed, but it’s already time to get back to our budget discipline.
The next bar trip should await for the new year, which is only a few weeks away.
“Our son” rarely meets other Europeans, and spending time with people from “own culture” becomes necessity for most Westerners residing in Japan for longer periods of time.
Our quickly established friendship with our son deserved a continuation of its kind.
How about spending a New Year’s Eve together?
What would be a suitable place for it?
Tokyo, Nagoya, or small and traditional Takayama?
Stefan is thinking about a trip to Tokyo, but we don’t feel like getting back there yet.
We have a flight from Tokyo to Denpasar, Bali, in January, but Tokyo is not exactly our number-one favorite place in Japan.
We wouldn’t want to spend our last weeks there.
On the other hand, our budget doesn’t allow for a round trip to Tokyo and some other place in Japan.
– What if Stefan came to Takayama, where we are traveling for work and Christmas?
Our son has never been to Takayama, so he is excited about the idea.
Maybe, with the lights of Tokyo flashing in mind, quite a big contrast to the small traditional village, he is willing to follow his new parents to the countryside for the family reunion.
We manage to get him insured.
After all, he has already fallen in love with our favorite city, Nara, and is not only an avid hiker but also interested in traditional Japanese culture.
For us pa’s this comes as a surprise, an old town in the Japanese Alps is actually quite an attractive idea for him.
Well, there is hardly any need to queue at bars, let alone pay expensive entrance fees.
We end up in Takayama, all three of us.
We and our son Stefan. And a few others.
To be continued…
