In the summer of 2024, I cut my New Mexican artist residency short to visit my baby brother in Japan. He had spent the previous three years serving at the Marine base in Okinawa and had developed a near-local level of familiarity with various Japanese cities and the nightlives therein, as well as a cultural and linguistic fluency that made him an ideal guide.

I, however, am a morning person.

While I was waking up at 6 AM every morning, Dane would only just be getting home after a night of roving any given district. Though I enjoyed exploring the temples, restaurants, and parks of Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka in the daylight, I found my trip lacking those social interactions with locals that are vital to the kind of travel I like to do. Even when exchanging pleasantries with other tourists from around the world, the disparity of connection with Japanese people in Japan had me feeling lonely more often than not. It wasn’t until after we had moved on to Vietnam that I realized my error. The work culture of Japan is such that nightlife is the real refuge of workaholics. My inclination to be in bed by 10 PM precluded me from making genuine connections with Japanese people at their most receptive, simple because I wasn’t in those spaces at those times. I did make a couple Japanese friends during my stay, but for my next trip, I plan to prime myself ahead of time, i.e., conditioning myself by staying up late, drinking more, and learning more Japanese than just asking for water.

Local disconnection aside, I did manage to befriend a lovely Ecuadorian family that you’ll see pop up throughout these photos (they “followed” us from Tokyo to Osaka), and an Indonesian scientist who accompanied to the Osaka Symphony, introduced me to the two most delicious meals I had in the country, and reveled with me in our favorite indie film, Columbus.