Two weeks in Japan is a bewildering, befuddling experience. No one who has been to Tokyo will ever forget it. No one who has been to the Iya Valley in far-off Shikoku, during cherry blossom season, will ever forget it either.
You always hope that travel, even just for a frantic fortnight of scrambling cross-country, will give you an insight into the place you’ve visited. That can be a forlorn hope. The Japanese people are incredibly warm, polite, fun hosts, but I’m not Anthony Bourdain and I’d hesitate to make any grand claims about what I learned about Japan over this Easter.
But of course, you see and learn plenty about another constituency of people – your fellow tourists. The sheer scale of global visitors to Japan is hard to comprehend, but whatever chance you may have of learning something about your hosts is lessened when you’re one of thousands of foreigners pouring through tourist sites, coffee shops and restaurants every day. This is the reality of 21st-century travel, and it’s something that we all wrestle with to a greater or lesser degree. Is this Japan, or a tourist theme park? Should we care as long as we’re enjoying ourselves?
One aspect of travel which now seems completely unavoidable is the anxiety among people to record every single moment of their trip for posterity. My travelling companion and I watched with some amusement the lengths to which people will go to try to capture the perfect shot. This is real “old man yells at cloud” territory, I know, but it was hard to ignore. A photograph should act as an aide-memoire ... but what if your only memory of Mount Fuji is trying for 45 minutes to get a killer photograph of it?
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We didn’t have a camera in our pockets throughout our teenage years, so maybe there’s a reflexive slump of the shoulders every time a photo is suggested, a reluctance completely absent from the youth of today. Older generations took that reserve even further.
I remember watching with bemusement my mother unpack a fistful of postcards she had bought on a trip she and my father made to Spain one time. When I asked her what the deal was with these unsent, unsigned, untouched postcards, she was absolutely clear. The photos on them are great, much better than she could have managed on her camera, so why bother taking her own? Who wants to be looking at our faces in these things anyway? That, we can all agree, is probably taking it a little too far.
Nothing my wife and I saw in Japan came close to our trip to New Zealand years ago, on a bus journey to Milford Sound in the South Island. Our bus driver was Irish – from Raheny, in fact – and he stopped numerous times at the more famous beauty spots on the route.
The trip is one of the most extraordinary journeys by road you can take anywhere in the world, but we couldn’t stop staring at a family of two parents and a child no more than eight or nine months old, who tore off the bus first at every stop, lugging a selfie-stick, a tripod and two cameras, pushing fellow travellers out of the way, before engaging in frantic, increasingly elaborate photographic set-ups.
The mother appeared to be the driving force behind this, the husband an extremely frazzled assistant, and the poor child little more than a prop, narrowly avoiding getting brained by photographic equipment at every moment. It was a hilarious pantomime, and it was repeated for the entire journey.
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What will they remember of the day, we wondered? Maybe they were banking on the trick of the brain that photography can so often play – if we look happy in the photograph, maybe we really were happy, and not stressed out of our minds getting screamed at to get the hell back on the bus by a lad from Dublin 5.
The Masters at Augusta National bans phones and cameras altogether, and you can see the difference it made last weekend. It shouldn’t be revolutionary for people to experience life, rather than trying to capture it, but it is. Premier League grounds are increasingly plagued by this depressing vista of people watching games on their phones.
In my experience at least, attending live sporting events in Ireland is still largely free of this obsession. I was in the corner of Lansdowne Road where Rob Baloucoune scored his thrilling first-half try against Scotland last month, and I’m really glad I remember that moment and not a simulacrum of it via whatever crappy video of the moment I might have been filming.
Maurice Brosnan wrote an exceptional piece for The 42 after Seán O’Shea’s winning free-kick against Dublin in the 2022 All-Ireland football semi-final, inspired by a James Crombie photograph. The original photo had O’Shea out of focus in the foreground, with hundreds of fans in the lower Hogan in focus behind him.
Brosnan tracked down and interviewed several of the fans featured in the photograph for what made a beautiful accompaniment, but what was really striking was how few people were on their phones. That should be jealously guarded. The provincial hurling championships start this weekend, and if ever there was a sport to expose the utter inability of a camera phone to capture anything like the real thing, it’s hurling. That’s according to this old boomer, at least, who’s much happier living it than filming it.
