No. 5 · Japan, 1994

In 2019, I moved to Japan to work for Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation. Most people assumed it was my first time in Japan.

It was my first time working there. That much was true.

But my first time in Japan was 25 years earlier.

By 2019, I had lost count of the visits. Most of them to see family.

So how did I end up with family in Japan?

My very first visit was near the end of April 1994. I was almost 16.

It was a family trip. My brother had moved to Japan a year or two earlier to study, and we went to see him.

By then my family was scattered across the map. My brother in Japan. Both my sisters back in Colombo, the eldest training to be a doctor. My parents and me still in Malaysia.

It had not yet dawned on me that this was unusual. To have a family spread across the world.

Anyway, I fell in love with Japan the moment I arrived.

Everything was different. Completely, thrillingly different.

In 1994, Japan was not yet the country the whole world had discovered.

There was no Instagram. Even today, people go and cannot believe how different it feels. Imagine it through the eyes of a 15-year-old, in 1994.

For the previous five years, my life had been one country after another. But this was the first time a place did not just take me in. It captivated me.

I saw Mount Fuji.

And I saw snow for the first time in my life. Or what was left of it. By late April, most of it had melted, and what remained had hardened to ice. The last of winter, holding on as the air warmed.

A boy from the tropics, touching cold on a mountainside for the first time.

And then, in the middle of that wonder, the country was shaken.

I was there the week Ayrton Senna died. The great Formula 1 champion.

May 1st, 1994. Imola. He was not in Japan when it happened. But Japan loved him. He had raced for Honda. He had won at Suzuka. To many there, he was one of their own.

So a nation grieved. A Brazilian driver, mourned on the land of the rising sun.

The wonder and the sorrow, side by side, in a country I had only just met. I never forgot it.

My brother never really left. He married in Japan. Raised his children there. Built a whole life in the place we had come to visit. And I am proud of my nephew who is now an engineer who works for Subaru.

And I kept going back. Again and again, for 25 years, until the boy who fell in love with Japan at 15 arrived in 2019 to help a team build aircraft for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the largest industrial groups in the world.

Most colleagues thought I was just starting.

I was simply closing a circle that began in 1994.

The lesson:

What captures you when you are young is rarely a distraction. More often, it is a direction, waiting years for you to catch up to it.

To be continued…

WAYPOINTS · No. 5

A series of inflection points on a journey still being written.