The Adventure
Tears streaming down my face as I sit bathed in the weak light of a 8 inch LCD screen was not the way I had imagined a moment of revelation to occur.
On an 11-hour flight from Tokyo to London I did what was becoming my usual routine for not getting embarrassingly airsick. Eat before getting on the plane, skip the airline food, watch 4 films, get off. The most challenging part of this trip was deciding the lesser of two evils - McDonalds or airplane food. I went with the “Fillet-o-fish”.
But back to the moment of clarity. I am not one to cry when watching films, and when I do it’s almost never at the moments in which girlfriends or female family members have started becoming teary-eyed. For example, I got a lump in my throat and had a lot of dust in my eyes when Maximus died at the end of Gladiator, but not much else has got me emotional since then.
I cried like a baby, on a plane, about 3 or 4 times during Up. Thank god the lights were out and there were hardly any other passengers, or my manlihood could have flown away like a house with many balloons attached (oh yeah, great metaphor, not forced at all).
It’s hard to sum up without sounding corny, or reiterating what thousands of other reviewers have said. After all I’m not used to water dripping from holes near my eyeballs, and it’s still very disconcerting.
The point of all this is, I think I got an appreciation of what it is to spend your life with someone. There are so many love stories about burning passion, about being perfect for each other, a whirlwind romance that ends in bliss or fiery disaster. But Up is about the deep warm love between two people that are simply content to spend every day together.
That’s not to say that there haven’t been other films about growing old together, but what affected me more and made the film resonate with me so much was the ideas of adventure and exploration.
Beyond the hot girls, infinite games and bright lights of Japan, I think the fundamental the reason I moved to Tokyo was because I wanted to have an adventure. Rather than being pulled to Japan in particular, I think I was pushed from a life in the UK. Another country would have done, as long as it was exotic and different. I dreaded the idea of spending my entire life in the same country, visiting the same areas, seeing similar sights, speaking the same language. I imagined myself as an old man, having never done anything adventurous, been anywhere unusual, or really pushed myself beyond that which I knew.
I don’t hate England, or even dislike it, indeed as I write this now I’m flying back there for the first time in over a year. I’m really looking forward to it - a real Christmas with family, hearing proper British English, and a much Sunday Roast as I can handle. But to use a culinary metaphor, if the choice was between sunday roast every day for the rest of my life, or going for sushi for a while, I’d pick the change of scenery. Or menu. You get the point.
Man I’m getting hungry now.
Back to the sprit of adventure. The sceptical or possibly more experienced would say that not every day can be an adventure, and that living in a foreign country can become normal after a while. Having lived in Japan, which most people consider as being incredibly exotic and one of the farthest places you can be both geographically and culturally from Britain, a lot of things have become normal and the idea of “the adventure” has faded over the past year.
While Japan and Tokyo in particular still fascinate me, I think now that “the adventure” is less the places you go, and more the friends and companions you make and keep along the way. Without another soul to enjoy it with, I think Tokyo would quickly become dull for me, no matter how many new places I visit or people I talk to. It’s in sharing the memories of the adventure with others that they become much more real.
