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 country rarely crossed my mind beyond films, books and photographs of neon streets and quiet temples.

Sure, I wanted to visit. But live?

No. London was home.

Music was my entire world. 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.

I began to build a life here. I was content.

At some point the question stopped being, “When will I go back to the UK?” and became, “Why should I?”

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 - A Tokyo-based photographer documenting a more authentic Japan beyond posts and postcards.

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.