The last 10 days of our awesome world-trip we spend in Yokohama & Tokyo. And why Tokyo? Because it’s Tokyo!! Wow what an awesome place, first of all the city looks beautiful. Although many buildings are very modern, you see the strong culture and traditions everywhere. Japan is a country that breaths culture, a unique culture which we completely fell in love with! The people are so polite and friendly, they are a very proud people.. but not in the patriotic ‘God Bless America’ way. More by honoring the culture and being polite to strangers like us to show the best of Japan. We heard it’s not uncommon that a local buys you a dish because they want you to try the local speciality. That’s pretty awesome right?
We had a contact; Andy Game, who lives in Japan over a decade and has his own media company called 7media. The night we arrived he took us out to dinner to try some of the local food: shashimi, tempura, miso soup… even talking about it makes my mouth watering again. The food in Japan is unmatched, it is brilliant, it is awesome, it is a piece of heaven! But Andy took us out to dinner and invited us to come to an Onsen the next day to meet the rest of his team and experience a real Japanese tradition. Socializing is done at the onsen (Hot spring / bath house / sauna / spa)! To make a long story short, the Japanese way of saying ‘welcome’ is: Let’s get naked and take a bath together! Yes! That’s something different, but apparently pretty normal in Japanese standards. Nevertheless we must say it was a pretty relaxing experience once you get over the fact that there are 80 naked Japanese men ‘bathing’ around you.
The next day they invited us to come over to their office in Yokohama and explained how they’re planning to do a flash mob in Shibuya, Tokyo to launch a new website. And they asked if we could help filming it. It’s always nice to help each other out, so we helped setting up the whole plan, went out to explore the Shibuya crossing and decided where the cameras needed to be. Finally we also helped filming the flash mob itself, you can see a short edit they made of the event here:
In the process of planning it we got to know Jireh and Takeshi, the creatives of the media team. And they also showed us around Tokyo a bit and gave us some nice tips. We explored the whole Shibuya area, Akihabara (a.k.a. electronic / gadget / geek city), Ueno and Harajuku. We didn’t have time to explore the whole city, because it’s simply to big.. and we also didn’t have time enough to make a trip to Mount Fuji… But to be honest, after a 4 month trip exploring the world.. you’re no longer really bummed out to miss one thing. We went to freakin’ Tokyo and it was AWESOME!
Like we said earlier.. food wise Japan was the top of the whole trip. The yakitori: amazing, the ramen: heaven, the sushi: mind-blowing! This place is foodie-heaven. It’s no comparison to any other place in the world! In our short time in Japan we fell in love with the people, the culture and the food. It was the perfect place to end of this trip, with personal breakthroughs and overall highlights!
On the 28th of May we had to leave Japan and fly back home. One 12 hour flight, a transfer 6 hour transfer at Doha, a 7 hour flight to Brussel and a 4 hour ride in busy traffic back home… But finally we are home again! Although it feels good to be among our family and friends again.. it feels strange. Because “home” is still the same… but we are so different. These 4 months changed our lives completely, it made us brothers for life through all the experiences we shared. We met so many cool people and are super inspired to finish this film “The Life-Light”. It will probably take about two more months to finish it all, but we’ll keep you up to date how the process goes! Thank you all for following our personal journey, for supporting us and sharing The Life-Light spirit. We can’t wait to show you the end result,, but in the meantime enjoy these pictures from Japan!
Best, Jordi & Daan
