Tom Fitzmaurice

“In the years to come, I would travel home every year for two weeks at Christmas and occasionally in the summer for the odd wedding or other special occasion. Central Tokyo was familiar and rural Wiltshire was home. There shouldn't have been any surprises or feelings of disjointedness when arriving in two places I knew so well. However, the transit between the two was poleaxing for the emotions. It was almost as if it just wouldn't translate, my mind just couldn't compute the abrupt shift because the difference was too vast. The jet lag, the disoriented feeling and the disruption to your body clock are due to covering huge distances at an unnatural speed. I think in many ways culture shock works in a similar way. If you were to travel overland to the Far East, you would witness and experience gradually the slowly changing landscape and people. The cultures would shift in increments and the evolution would be natural, giving you time to assimilate and process it in your mind.

Flying from Europe to Tokyo is like arriving suddenly at extreme altitude and the tiredness and jet lag that go with it only exacerbates this feeling of cultural disjointedness. I'd find myself sitting in my flat crying after returning to Tokyo and not knowing why. I wasn't sad, it was sometimes just all too much. One minute you're sitting around the dinner table with your family having Christmas dinner in a familiar setting, the next you are back in the madness that is Tokyo.”
― Tom Fitzmaurice, Canned Coffee and Kimonos