Letters from Tokyo #1: Why I Came to Japan
A quiet street near my home - a far cry from London, yet somehow exactly where I’m meant to be.
I never planned to live in Japan. In fact, the idea barely crossed my mind beyond the films and books that coloured my teens with distant images of neon streets and quiet temples.
London was home, music was my entire world, and my future felt mapped out in rehearsals, concert halls, and late-night practice rooms. But life has a way of nudging you sideways.
I first came to Japan in 2003 — not in search of reinvention, but simply because the chance appeared. A temporary opportunity.
A year abroad. Something to do before returning to the “real” path. I told myself I’d be back in twelve months.
What I didn’t expect was the feeling — subtle at first — that this place was pulling something out of me I didn’t know I needed: the contrasts; the space; the rhythm of a culture that seemed to move at a completely different frequency from the one I grew up in.
Tokyo was overwhelming, warm, bewildering, isolating, inspiring — often all on the same day. But instead of retreating, I leaned in.
I found work. I found purpose. I built a life far from the one I had imagined.
I fell in love — with the country, with its contradictions, with the person who would become my wife and business partner.
One year became five.
Five became ten.
At some point the question stopped being, “When will I go back to the UK?” and became, “How do I move forward from here?”
Looking back now, I don’t think I came to Japan for any one single reason that I can easily articulate.
I think I came because the version of myself I needed to become was waiting for me here. A different kind of creativity. A different kind of patience. A different understanding of what “home” can mean.
I still return to London sometimes, and the familiarity hits me like a piece of music I haven’t played in years. But Tokyo — with all its noise, beauty, strain, solitude, energy, and impossible tenderness — is where my life grew into something I never expected: a partnership, a purpose, and a version of myself I wouldn’t have found anywhere else.
And this is what I hope to share through this series: not the tidy version of life abroad, but the real one — the detours, the discomfort, the strange luck, and the slow, unexpected ways a place can remake you.
Tokyo didn’t just become home. It rerouted the path I thought I was on. And somewhere in that shift, I became someone I would never have met if I hadn’t boarded that flight in 2003.
Sincerely,
Ross Harrison - Tokyo-based photographer working with couples who want to experience Japan quietly and honestly.
P.S.
This is the first in a series I’m naming Letters from Tokyo — a place to look back at the detours and discoveries that shaped my experience of making a home in Japan and finding my place in Tokyo. If these reflections resonate, I hope you’ll join me for the next one, which won’t be far behind.