Hong Kong

Of all that's happened lately, my trip to Hong Kong is most worthy of further description. Here goes.

The future will look like Hong Kong. A city where no one is out of place and yet no one is at home. Everyone is always in transit, passing through. People peddling fake watches and handbags constantly vie for your attention in the few seconds they have as you walk toward the next station or bus stop. I listen in earnest admiration as the woman working the desk at my cheap Kowloon guest house switches flawlessly back and forth between Chinese and British-accented English. But you are just as likely to hear German, French, or Hindi as English and Chinese. Whatever language you speak, there's someone ready to speak it back at you, especially if it means you'll buy something.

There are times when I definitely feel like I'm in China, with ducks hanging in meat shop windows and older people gathered in the park for Tai Chi. Other times, like when walking through the trendy restaurants and bars of the Soho district (yes, it's really called Soho), I'm back in the North American cities I haven't seen in years. The clean and efficient metro is like something you'd find in Europe, and the British voice over the loudspeaker only adds to the illusion. That quickly fades as I walk through areas packed with women in saris hawking various wares along the sides of the streets leading to the ferry. If I'd been homesick for Japan, there were plenty of sashimi restaurants and Japanese characters and movies to make me feel like I was back at home. International doesn't even begin to cover the feeling of Hong Kong. It's more like a miniature version of the world packed into one city with no set borders, no boundaries.

I bought American candy and shopped in H&M on Saturday. I went and saw one of the world's largest buddha statues on Sunday and met Mickey Mouse in Hong Kong Disneyland on Monday. The range of possibilities was seemingly endless. Hong Kong felt like a place where you could find pretty much anything you might be looking for.

Usually when I travel, I'm happy to come home to Japan. But after visiting Hong Kong, for the first time, I felt differently. It seemed suddenly that my beloved Kobe, and even Osaka, were gray, flat places, lacking the vibrancy and dimension I found in Hong Kong. Japan is Japan, and no other ideas hold sway over it. While that's what makes it special, it's also what makes it frustrating and suffocating at times. The future doesn't look like Japan anymore. Going to Hong Kong really put that reality in front of me for the first time.

It was only after meeting some of my students on the train home and talking with them that I remembered being in Japan is a far more important thing for me to be doing. If Japan wants to eventually make it to the future, it needs people like me to help them realize they aren't the only place in the world. Hong Kong doesn't need me to internationalize it, it has it's own momentum on that front. Still, I can't say I didn't find my trip to the future fascinating, and I may have to do it again sometime.