With maybe four to five hours of sleep before landing in Tokyo around 11pm, the usual feelings that come with travel were present, but something new was also there. As though my internal compass could sense the difference - I‘d never been to this side of earth before. Hairs raised,nerves vibrated as I stared out the plane’s window anxiously waiting to disembark.

Excited, exhausted, and carrying nothing more than the pack on my back, I made my way down a long, modern and mostly empty airport hallway. Customs in Japan wasn‘t any more friendly than the states, but it was professional and efficient. Something that would prove to be a pattern in this country.

Before starting this adventure, I had befriended Takuya Miura, a Japanese adventurist and gear-head through Instagram. He met me at the entrance to the airport where I gave him, a likely unexpected, hug. We made our way to his car and did our best to make conversation in English. Like a lazy American, I had failed to learn any amount of usable Japanese. We decided we‘d head into Tokyo and spend some time eating and drinking in Shibuya. It was the one place I could think that would be sure to be just lively enough to give me my first real sense of life in Japan.

We drove through the streets of Tokyo, long neon lit avenues and smaller dark spiderwebs of networked alleyways. We chatted about where I was from, where I had been, where I was going, and what I wanted to eat for dinner. I asked Takuya about his life growing up in Shimane, about making his own gear, hiking, camping, and his life in Yokohama where he works as a physical therapist.

Parked, we started walking the streets of Shibuya at night. Young and old passing here and there through narrow pedestrian paths and across busy intersections. There were the typical Japanese businessmen, and the incredibly hip teenagers. There were tourists, lonely park attendants, construction crews, and men propositioning men to visit their “massage“ parlors.

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