As I write this, I’m sitting in a crowded cafe at Haneda airport. The bustling terminal is filled with international travelers, some coming home, some only just arriving in Japan. My partner and I have spent the last two weeks traveling up Japan from Osaka to Tokyo with a group of my friends from high school. It’s his first time traveling outside of the U.S., and I wonder if I’ve done a good job of showing him the country and culture that I’m so interested in.

“What was your favorite thing we did this week?” I ask him.

“The bath at the ryokan in Kyoto was really nice, and the teamlabs art installation was interesting,” he says. “It hasn’t been a relaxing trip, more like a rollercoaster, but I’m still glad we came.”

It’s true, this hasn’t been a restful trip. Between mixing up train lines and rushing to meet our reservation appointments, we haven’t had a lot of downtime. He also doesn’t speak any Japanese. It’s probably been pretty overwhelming for him. Maybe next time one week will be enough.

I have a complicated relationship with this country. This is my seventh time coming to Japan, by my count. I started studying Japanese in high school because of my interest in anime, and by college my love of the country’s culture broadened to the degree that I described myself as a “Japanophile.” I’m even planning to take the JLPT soon to get the credentials to back up my grasp on the language. But as our journey ends, I can’t help but feel some apprehension. It’s no mystery to me why: whenever I come to Japan, things are different when I return to America.

In high school I took a class trip to Japan during a tumultuous time in my parents’ relationship. When I came home, my dad had moved out of the house and taken half of his belongings with him. In college, I studied abroad for a semester, and came back to a changed social dynamic. Some friendships had reached their breaking point in my absence, and I’m sure, to my friends, I was different too. Even as an adult, I took a vacation to Japan with some work colleagues, only to find that my job title and role had been stripped from me, and that I had been assigned to a new department without notice or consultation by the time I returned.

Those experiences have a way of leaving a lingering impression on a person. As we rode bikes through Kyoto and walked through busy streets in Tokyo, in the back of my mind I wondered what would be different by the time I came home.

In Japanese there’s a term, mono no aware, the pathos of things. It’s a phrase used to evoke the fleeting nature of this world. I think of it when I buy new clothes or a new electronic device, this inescapable feeling that someday these things that are new and bright will be old and faded. It’s a fact of life, something everyone and everything experiences, yet I still find it difficult to get used to, despite my awareness.

While we’ve been in Japan, it’s been interesting to see how things have changed since my previous visits. Akihabara is more mainstream now. The slang I hear on the train is different. Even my friends, in some ways, feel more mature than I am, or at least farther along into adulthood. In an open air onsen under a blanket of stars, they talked about getting married and having kids. It doesn’t feel like that long ago we were playing Super Smash Bros. and building Gunpla together. When did they become adults? Maybe that’s an unfair perspective to have. After all, I’ve changed a lot since then too.

To my partner, however, all of this is new. He doesn’t have a frame of reference for what things used to be like; Japan, and my friends, are making their first impressions on him as they are now. Have my descriptions of how things used to be come across like a millennial waxing poetic about how cool the 90’s were? 

Maybe it’s just post-vacation depression. We really have had a wonderful time while we were here. I reconnected with friends and teachers, and got more than a few souvenirs along the way. Still, I can’t help but feel a pit in my stomach waiting for the news that makes home feel like a different place than the one I left two weeks ago.