IN MY OWN WORDS

Japanese dreams VS COVID-19 emergency

Where were you when the COVID-19 health emergency broke out?
When the COVID-19 emergency broke out I was in Tokyo, Japan, after leaving for an experience I long planned for.

When did you leave for Japan? Before leaving, were you already aware of this emergency?
I left for Japan in early January, and that time it was still unknown about the whole COVID situation. I arrived in Tokyo on January 4th and a few weeks after the first news about the Coronavirus began to circulate, but it was still not possible to guess its seriousness. Frankly, I was very calm and I felt comfortable, safe, not in danger.

How did you plan your experience in Japan? How has it changed compared to the plans you had?
The outbreak of the health emergency changed many of the plans I had made. I chose Tokyo - although initially I would have preferred to go to Osaka, another city - because I hoped to find work thanks to the 2020 Olympics that the metropolis was supposed to host in August. But, as we all know, the Olympics have unfortunately been postponed to 2021. And this was a great disappointment for me.
The real problems began in March, when the state of emergency was proclaimed towards the end of the month and all activities began to close. Between the end of March and the beginning of April in Japan is the Hanami period, the blossoming of cherry blossoms that has become famous all over the world and capable of attracting many tourists to the country. Due to the emergency, many flights were canceled and many tourists blocked, causing the influx of very few people during this particular period. In the photos I took, the parks are empty, without people, and in some of them it was even forbidden to do the traditional "hanami": romantic picnics under the cherry blossoms.
In addition, I found a job in a restaurant which, because of the shortage of customers, left me home. In mid-April I was supposed to start a school here, but due to the emergency all the schools and assembly activities were closed and I had to wait before starting the lessons also in online format. The language lessons were very difficult: understanding Japanese would have been complicated in presence, let alone at a distance!
Finally, I couldn't even visit the country as I would have liked. Many places were closed and inaccessible to the emergency.

How was your typical day in Japan during the emergency?
In Japan, the lockdown has been different from Italy. People were not forced to stay at home: if I had wanted to, I could have gone out. But since all the businesses and shops were closed due to the emergency, there was very little to do and we all stayed at home. I spent the first weeks of quarantine in Japan at home, with very few outings with friends in the park, for shopping or jogging. These few ones really saved me: in fact, here I live in a share-house and my room measures 2-3 square meters. It is really very small and I felt almost in a cage.
Fortunately, cases of COVID-19 have declined significantly in the last period and I have been able to go out with friends more often. I was very impressed with the behavior of the people here in Japan. Although the lockdown was voluntary, all citizens followed state advice and there were very few transgressions. it was nice to see humanity and the altruism of people, who thought of others and not only of themselves.

Unlike many others for whom isolation was a surprise, you had somehow become accustomed to the idea of ​​staying away from your loved ones and friends for some time. How did you experience this distance? Has the external situation conditioned your way of feeling also with respect to this?
I came to Japan to find my own dimension, to look for my spaces, a place for myself. During this situation, therefore, I did not particularly miss my relatives; I was more worried about my grandparents, being the elderly most affected by the disease, and for my mom and her partner, employed in a nursing home, one of the places most affected by the virus. But luckily they were all well.
I feel almost lucky to have found myself on the other side of the world during this emergency, given that here I was freer than Italy: I could go out and there was no obligation to stay home for everyone. Being in a peripheral part of Tokyo, I always found some family or people around and the distance from normality was less strong than what I heard from my friends in Italy.

Have you ever feel the will to go home?
Honestly, as I said before, I felt lucky, and therefore no, I never had a strong desire to go home. In fact, my school permit, thought to last only six months, is expiring in these days. These days I have had to think a lot about whether to extend my stay in Japan or go home. I had many doubts: if COVID-19 returned as dangerous as before and restarted the quarantine, it would not make sense to spend another six months at home on the other side of the world. But I decided to extend my experience and give myself another chance to live here in Japan.

What will most impress you with this experience?
I was very impressed to find myself in my favorite neighborhoods, usually full of people and life, and seeing them empty and uninhabited. Similarly, it was very strange to be alone in the subway tip of a metropolitan city that has more than 15 million people.
But here in Japan people do well, always wearing masks and sanitizing their hands before entering each shop, and there have been very few cases. In general, I feel lucky to have experienced this emergency here, I think it has been well managed by the country and I have always felt safe.

What are your plans for the future?
My plan is to extend my stay here for another six months. I hope to find a job to get a work visa and stay here, but my main goal now is to learn the language as best I can.

Do you feel you can claim to have learned something in particular from this experience?
To be honest, the Japanese population has always been very health conscious. I had already come to Japan and I had already noticed that people wore the mask even for a simple cold and are used to sanitizing their hands before entering the shops. These behaviors were already normal here, and they helped prevent the emergency from spreading across the country. I had already learned from them therefore to keep these security measures. In general, the comparison with other realities affects me much more. From the stories of my parents and friends, it really looks like they were in a movie or TV series. Here the situation I experienced was more normal. I just hope I can stay a little longer to enjoy Japan in its fullness.

Elia Mazzi, 6th June 2020, Tokyo, Japan