Coming Home by Leaving Home

At the end of this month, I’ll be going to the Netherlands for a month.

Having lived there for over thirty years, I don’t feel any sense of homesickness. The Netherlands was once the center of my world — the place where I studied, worked, and built my financial independence. But now, it feels more like a chapter that helped shape me rather than the place where my life still unfolds.

What will be interesting this time is to see how much I’ll miss Japan while I’m away. I’ve settled here so well that Japan truly feels like home. Even though I’m not yet fully fluent in Japanese, I feel deeply at home — in the rhythms of daily life, in the kindness of people, in the quiet sense of belonging that grows without words.

It’s not that I’ve lost affection for the Netherlands. I still look forward to celebrating Christmas with my family — something I can’t do in Japan. And of course, I’m already dreaming of real cheese and proper sausages — simple things that taste like nostalgia, even if I can get them in Japan for a higher price and smaller portion.

So yes, in some ways I look forward to returning, and in others, I know I’ll miss Japan. Maybe home isn’t a single place anymore and when I return to Japan before the end of this year, I’ll really understand what I truly missed — and what “home” has quietly come to mean.