When I became friends with Julia, I could never have imagined that 25 years later we’d sing ourselves hoarse at a shady fifth-floor karaoke bar in Osaka with our teenage sons. Actually, the karaoke bit I might have seen. One of the reasons Julia and I became friends was that we were often the last people to leave a dance floor. We spent many nights in our early 30s with arms around each other at sunrise, exhausted but thrillingly alive. I would look at her and think: you are glorious.
So we were very excited when, in February 2020, we decided to take the boys to Japan for their 11th birthdays. And then very disappointed when the pandemic meant we weren’t going anywhere in 2020, nor 2021. We didn’t arrive in Tokyo until April 2023. Japan, it turns out, is the ideal destination for teenage boys because it offers that most precious of commodities: freedom. Despite being home to 14 million people – nearly 40 million, if you count the greater metropolitan area – Tokyo is safe and easy to get around.Every morning, after eating hash browns and karaage chicken from the closest Seven Eleven, the boys were off, carrying nothing but their suica train cards and a pocket Wi-Fi so they could access Google maps.
Between sleepy fishing villages sit extraordinary buildings by Tadao Ando and other luminaries, and artworks by the likes of James Turrell, Claude Monet, Walter de Maria and Yayoi Kusama.It was here that our freedoms most beautifully intertwined. On Naoshima the four of us rented electric bikes and flew out of the port on a pristine spring day, racing each other up the hills.