Springtime in Tokyo

Three years after the outbreak of Covid forced us to cancel our flights to Japan at the last minute in March 2020, and nearly 40 months after our last trip outside of Hong Kong in December 2019, my family and I finally boarded a plane this past March to enjoy a long-awaited holiday together – to Japan no less.

The trip was also the culmination of three years of communal daydreaming amongst our group of friends in Hong Kong, with whom we spent many an evening throughout the pandemic talking about where we’d travel to first once travel restrictions were loosened and borders opened again. When it looked like we’d finally be able to make some concrete holiday plans together, Tokyo was an easy first choice.

There’s only.a handful of cities in the world with as heavy a pop culture resonance and presence as Tokyo, and certainly in Asia it stands head and shoulders above its peers. I’ve been to Tokyo a couple of times over the years, once tagging along with Ashley on a business trip in 2015, and once as a sort of reunion holiday with her in 2017 after I had spent some time reporting for a magazine based in Yangon. I can tell you, this city never gets old for me. The cityscape is so dense and layered, the neighbourhoods so dynamic and different from one part of town to another, and every time I visit I get enamoured with whole new parts of the city that I never knew existed before.

The one big difference between our previous times in Tokyo and this trip – we’d be traveling as a family of four for the first time. Gone are the days, at least for now, where Ashley and I could wake up whenever, go wherever we wanted, sleep whenever wanted, and then do it all again the next day. Having to account for the needs and wants of a four year old and a one-and-a-half year old changes everything.

Turning 40

The vacation was also planned to overlap with my fortieth birthday, a milestone I’m still processing to this day. We marked the occasion by cooking up some incredibly fatty and very reasonably priced wagyu steaks (thank you Japanese stagflation) and piping hot sukiyaki in our hotel suite overlooking the Sumida River in the Asakusa neighbourhood. It might be a bit strange to call it a low-key celebration given we all flew over to Tokyo for it, but the intimate evening of good food, close friends, and quiet conversation was about as much as I really cared to ask for after the last three years.

After all, these were the friends that had helped us get through the darkest days of the pandemic together, creating a safe space to support one another and continue the rhythms of community despite the social distancing and mask mandates. To be able to come out to Tokyo together felt like a healing moment for those of us who came out of the pandemic feeling a vague sense of loss or having been robbed of something we hadn’t fully held possession of yet. Beyond the very real health impacts of Covid, there were lost years and lost opportunities, dreams that had to be delayed or even shelved, and the world waiting for us at the other side of the pandemic was not necessarily one where you could just pick up where you left off.

In that sense, celebrating my fortieth and saying farewell to my thirties was also a chance to start moving on from the pandemic and seek out a new normal. And some things the pandemic didn’t change at all – the joys of living in community, cooking good food together, and dreaming new dreams.

Family

In the end, the people I had most wanted to experience Tokyo together with was my family. We’d traveled with Miles a fair bit during the first year or so of his life – Cambodia, Thailand, Australia, Taiwan, Austria, and Czhechia by the time he was 15 months old. And then the pandemic happened, borders closed, quarantines went into effect, and we ended up stuck and trapped in Hong Kong for three years.

In the middle of those three years, Olive joined our little family, a true child of the pandemic. We had some idea of how Miles would travel, but Olive was a bit of a wild card. As parents there’s a tendency to get fixated on everything that could potentially go wrong, to the point where it starts to outweigh all of the reasons in favour of whatever it is you’ve got planned. And so we fretted about the flights, the new environments, the unfamiliar beds, and the long days out and about criss-crossing the biggest city in the world.

But the kids made it easy, and our host of selfless friends willing to adapt to our kids’ schedules and help lug bags and strollers and tired children for days on end made it even more of a breeze. Miles was enamoured by the multitude of different-coloured trains that make up Tokyo’s dizzying metro map, Olive was a true foodie and ate everything we put in front of her, and Ashley and I had about as smooth a first-time-traveling-with-two-kids experience as we could probably ask for.