Missing Japan

I love traveling everywhere, but it is only Japan that I hate leaving.

In an Instagram story the girl’s eyes are welling up above her face mask. She is devastated; she is about to get on a plane to leave Japan. I know that feeling all too well. As of the moment of writing this, I have been back for a week from my seventh trip to the land of the rising sun, and my post-Japan blues has not abated. Neither has my wife’s. She’s been studying Japanese for over a year. She makes soba for dinner, as we slowly eat and drink our way through everything we have brought back, trying to hold on to the moments of magic that inexorably slip away. I obsess over our airline mileage account, strategizing our next trip.

There are many like us. We are a tribe of freaks whose love for Japan the laymen who prefer to lounge on a beach in the Caribbean or troop from one Paris museum to another will never understand. We come in various stripes – fashion fanatics, record and book collectors, manga and anime lovers.

Japan is one of those places you have to visit in order to get it. It has its own sense of je ne sais quoi that is hard to put into words. Edward Luttwak once wrote in the London Review of Books, “One can fly to Japan from anywhere, but from Japan one can only fly to the Third World.” He knows.

For the fashion photographer Tommy Ton, who has been visiting Japan since 2009, there is nothing like it. “Just from a sensory standpoint, you immediately feel a sense of calm once you get off the plane,” he says. On his last trip Mr. Ton was documenting the Comme des Garçons loyalists for his upcoming book. Going back to New York hit him hard. “I was crying in the lounge, and then again when I landed in Chicago. I cannot wait to go back,” he says.

Tokyo, Japan’s nexus, is a vast metropolis, twice the size of New York City. By all accounts it should be a mess, but it functions like clockwork. It is spotless. There are no trash cans on Tokyo’s streets; everyone takes their trash with them. Cars are not allowed to park on its streets and you are only allowed to smoke in designated areas. The city’s vast subway system is a marvel of engineering and precision. And for its vast size, the city is unbelievably quiet. In New York City drivers honk just because their cars are equipped with a horn. In Tokyo, a honking car is national news.

Tokyoites are extremely cognizant and respectful of other people’s personal space. You can be in a river of people in Omotesando or Ginza, Tokyo’s premier shopping districts, and not feel overwhelmed. I have never seen a Japanese person use their phone’s speaker. As a matter of fact, I cannot recall a single instance of hearing a cell phone ring; everyone keeps theirs on silent.

Tokyo is not a conventionally beautiful city. It possesses neither the royal grandeur of Paris, nor the historic charm of London, nor the Art Deco vertical sweep of New York. Tokyo’s beauty is human scale. Its myriad of small buildings is a jumble of styles that somehow just works. It is largely left to the residents and to the small shop owners to beautify their tiny plot of Tokyo. These small businesses make up the fabric of the city – the restaurants with ten seats, the tiny bars and cafes, the independent boutiques.

One thing that unifies Japan is quality. It is the lifeblood of the country, imbued in its art, in its craft, in its everyday life. Japan is a culinary paradise. In Tokyo or in Kyoto, the question of where is the best ramen or the best cup of coffee is pointless. The answer is, anywhere. Tokyo’s department store food courts are the eighth wonder of the world. And if you are too exhausted from walking and just want to lay in your hotel bed shoving food into your mouth, the legendary Japanese convenience stores await. Whether it’s 7-Eleven or Lawson or FamilyMart, you can simply eat your way through their snack and prepared food aisles, and you will be just fine. Anyone who’s been to a 7-Eleven in Japan knows what a cruel joke the ones in America are.

And then there is the rest of shopping. Japan has everything. Whether you are into clothes or books or records, you will find whatever it is you are hunting for in Japan. It seems that there is no out of print book that you won’t be able to source somewhere in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s vintage book shopping district, or a record that is not on a shelf in one of a thousand (it feels like a thousand) of the city’s record shops. The photographer and filmmaker Jeremy Elkin is a record and book hound. On our last Jimbocho prowl he guided me to Nanyodo, a two-story shop that only sells architecture books, and to Super Labo, an independent publisher of art photography books whose binding and print quality blows anything else I have seen out of the water.

And if you are interested in fashion, Japan is truly valhalla. From the biggest department stores to the myriad of small “select shops,” independently curated boutiques that allow you that long lost pleasure of stumbling upon something unexpected, shopping for clothes in Japan is unparalleled. “What’s taken away from the shopping experience in the digital age is just to be able to experience a store and touch and feel everything,” Mr. Ton says with more than a hint of nostalgia, noting that he rarely shops in New York.

For the initiated, the trick is to go to Japan with a half-empty suitcase. If you don’t, you may end up buying an extra one, the way the menswear influencer Nick Wooster sometimes does. Mr. Wooster, whose Instagram following is over one-million-strong, fell in love with Tokyo on his first trip in 1990 as a department store buyer. He visits Tokyo at least twice a year at the invitation of the Rakuten Fashion Week. Just like for Mr. Ton, shopping in Tokyo reminds him of the glory days of physical retail. “It’s the whole experience, the selection, the customer service from the minute you’re greeted until the minute you leave, down to how they hand you the bag,” he says. Mr. Wooster also notes the prevalence of independent boutiques and the small business mindset.

“Tokyo is by far my favorite city to shop in,” concurs Josh Peskowitz, a menswear consultant. “The Japanese approach to building and merchandising stores is unlike the rest of the world. Many of the stores that we all love in other countries take cues from the Japanese in how they put things together, display their wares, and their attitude towards customer service. Secondly, Japan has countless brands doing incredibly good clothing that you can’t find anywhere else. Many of these have little interest in exporting their goods beyond their home market, but still can have dozens of stores across the country.”

To a layman’s eyes our passion is foreign. But we have sent agents into the lay world; one of these is the writer David Sedaris. To you he may be a clever essayist who writes funny stories, but to us he is a spy of fashion freakdom who has infiltrated the mainstream. He outed himself eight years ago in an epic New Yorker essay about shopping for fashion in Tokyo. And he didn’t just shop, he went for the most obscure, IYKYK stuff, like Kapital, 45RPM, and Paul Harnden. All the while he described how the things he was buying would make no sense in an ordinary world – meaning, the West – but they did to him. He knows.

And maybe that’s what sends us into an emotional tailspin every time we leave Japan – it’s not ordinary. Paris and London are wonderful, but they are familiar enough. I love traveling everywhere, but it is only Japan that I hate leaving. And, yes, Japan has many markings of the first world and its Western trappings, but its strong tradition of excellence, of quality, of care, produces a place that is palpably, qualitatively different. I also understand that when I visit, I only see a slice of the country. I know that it’s an essentially conservative, patriarchal society with an anemic economy. But what we, Japan lovers, experience is also real. It feels doubly real when we are back home, and everything around us feels inadequate. We have been changed by Japan, because we know that somewhere out there is a better place.