居場所 — A Place Where One Belongs

Migration is often discussed geographically.

• Where were you born?
• Where do you live now?
• What passport do you hold?
• Where do you pay tax?
• Where are you legally resident?

These are necessary questions for states.
They are rather inadequate questions for human beings.

A person who has lived between cultures for decades does not necessarily leave one identity behind and replace it neatly with another. Habits accumulate. Languages occupy different emotional spaces. Ways of greeting, apologising, teaching, disagreeing, eating, waiting and even remaining silent become embedded.

Culture eventually ceases to feel like something one consciously performs.
It becomes bodily.
This is particularly true of budō.
Decades of training do not simply leave behind a collection of techniques. They shape posture, expectations, relationships with hierarchy and ideas about effort, patience, responsibility and self-restraint.
The dojo travels with you.
So does the language.
So does memory.

An immigration office can withdraw a legal status.
It cannot quite revoke these things.
But I would be dishonest if I pretended that knowing this made the loss somehow easy.
It did not.
The pain went considerably deeper than losing a residence card.

For almost thirty years, my legal status in Japan had represented something profoundly important to me. It was an official acknowledgement that, although I was not Japanese and could not participate politically in the same way as a citizen, I nevertheless belonged there in a recognised and enduring way.

• I had built a family there.
• My children had grown up there.
• My wife remained there.
• My home was there.

My language, habits and much of my understanding of myself had developed there.
And suddenly, through the brutal neutrality of a missed deadline, that official connection disappeared.

There was no ceremony.

No acknowledgement of the decades that preceded it.
No distinction between somebody who had lived in Japan for most of an adult lifetime and somebody whose connection had been brief.
There was simply a date.
I had returned too late.

Legally, the answer was finished. Emotionally, it was not.

What hurt most was the feeling—irrational perhaps, but real nonetheless—of no longer being wanted.It was clear to me the current government of Japan no longer wanted people like me!

Japan had been one of the principal answers to the question Who am I?
Now the country itself seemed to be saying, at least bureaucratically: not here, not in the same way anymore.
At roughly the same moment I was also selling my house.
Those two events became difficult to separate.
One removed a legal connection.
The other removed a physical one.
Together they felt almost like an eviction from a version of myself.
And that still hurts.

居場所 — A Place Where One Belongs
Japanese has a useful word here: 居場所 (ibasho).
It can mean the place where one is, but emotionally it can carry something more: a place where one belongs, where one has a recognised place in the world.
Perhaps what I feared I had lost was not simply residence.
I feared I had lost my ibasho.

That distinction matters because a house and an immigration status are external things, while belonging is partly internal.
But knowing that does not remove grief.
Indeed, perhaps grief is precisely what happens when internal belonging and external recognition suddenly separate.
I still felt Japanese culture moving through my habits and decisions.
I still found certain thoughts easier to formulate in Japanese.
I still understood myself through decades of experience there.
Yet the legal structure that had once mirrored that internal reality no longer did.
The two had come apart.

And then, while walking through the bamboo groves and tanbo around my former home, I came upon a field of lotus.
蓮 — hasu.
A flower rooted in mud, rising through clouded water, opening above it without pretending the mud was never there.

• The symbolism is familiar within Buddhism.
• Its roots remain buried in darkness.
• Its stem passes through murky water.
• Yet the flower opens cleanly above the surface.
• The lesson is not that the mud has disappeared.
• Without the mud, there is no lotus.

苦 — The Reality of Suffering
Buddhism begins from an uncomfortable place.
苦 (ku)--dukkha.
Life contains suffering, dissatisfaction, instability and loss.
This is the starting point of the Four Noble Truths — 四諦 (shitai).

• The First Noble Truth recognises suffering.
• The Second asks us to recognise its causes, particularly attachment and craving.
• The Third maintains that liberation from this cycle is possible.
• And the Fourth points towards a disciplined way of living through the Noble Eightfold Path — 八正道 (hasshōdō).

The lotus is not literally a diagram of these teachings.
But standing there, the relationship seemed almost painfully obvious.
My mud was not theoretical.
It was grief.
Loss.
Dislocation.
The end of a legal status I had valued deeply.
The sale of a home.
And the realisation that one chapter of life had closed without asking whether I was ready.
The flower did not make any of that disappear.
It merely offered another way to see it.
無常 — Impermanence
This is not nihilism.
It is 無常 (mujō)—impermanence.
Not the claim that nothing matters, but almost the opposite.
Things hurt because they matter.

• Places matter.
• People matter.
• Homes matter.
• Identity matters.

And because they matter, their changing affects us profoundly.
Buddhism does not ask us to pretend otherwise.
The problem begins when we require that what we love remain unchanged for it to remain meaningful.
That was the part I was struggling with.

• I wanted Japan not merely to have shaped me.
• I wanted it to continue recognising that shaping in the same formal way.
• I wanted continuity.
• I wanted permanence.

And reality refused.

“You Must Go On”
Perhaps this is where Beckett belongs in the piece.
Not as an inspirational slogan.
Beckett is much too unsentimental for that.
At the end of The Unnamable comes the contradiction:
“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
There is something almost Buddhist in that refusal to resolve the contradiction neatly.
I cannot go on.

• And yet I go on.

The grief remains.

• And life continues.

Perhaps that is closer to what I felt walking through those fields than any easy instruction to “let go.”
I was not ready to let go.
In some ways I am still not.
But continuing does not require pretending that the loss was insignificant.
It means carrying it differently.
The mud remains mud.
The lotus does not deny it.

Budō and the Practice of Continuing
There is something here that also returns me to budō.
Martial practice frequently teaches through loss.

• Balance is taken.
• Techniques fail.
• The opponent does not behave as expected.
• Age changes what the body can do.
• Teachers die.
• Dojo close.
• Organisations fracture.
• Students leave.
• Eventually even the strongest practitioner encounters a body that no longer responds as it once did.

Budō therefore contains an education in 無常 whether practitioners consciously acknowledge it or not.

The lesson is not indifference.
It is continuation.

• We adjust.
• We bow.
• We begin again.
• Not because nothing was lost.

But precisely because something was.

A Different Kind of Residence
I no longer possess the same formal right of residence (evening writing this causes pain) that once meant so much to me.
That still hurts deeply.
I do not want to tidy that pain away for the sake of a neat Buddhist conclusion.

• I felt unwanted.
• I felt disconnected.

For a time, I felt as though a country in which I had invested most of my adult life had withdrawn its acknowledgement of that life.

But perhaps 居場所 cannot ultimately be granted entirely by an institution.
Japan remains in my language.

• In my family.
• In my habits.
• In my teaching.
• In my sense of restraint.
• In budō.

In the way I understand responsibility.

In the landscape I can still see when I close my eyes. The sounds I hear when English is just too jarring...when the oroa of Tokyo fades away on the bike on the Waterdord Greenway...

Thirty years of breakfasts, train journeys, dojo evenings, typhoons, humid summers, New Year mornings, arguments, friendships, births, losses and ordinary Tuesdays do not vanish because an immigration category changes.
They become sediment.
Mud, perhaps.
And from that mud something else may yet grow.
I cannot go on.
I’ll go on.
The lotus does not need to forget the mud in order to flower. They are one, indivisible.

この夏、私は「故郷」と呼んできた日本に戻った。しかし、その帰国は深い喪失感に覆われていた。
私は日本でほぼ30年を過ごし、家族を築き、子どもたちを育て、仕事をし、武道を学び、日本語で考え、日本の文化の中で自分自身を形づくってきた。日本は単に「住んでいた国」ではなく、私の成人後の人生そのものに深く結びついた場所である。
しかし今回、再入国の期限を約2週間過ぎてしまったことで、それまで長く維持していた在留資格を失った。
法的には単純な手続き上の出来事であったとしても、私にとってその意味はまったく単純ではなかった。
長年、自分が日本社会と正式につながっていることに誇りを感じていた。たとえ選挙権がなくても、その在留資格は「ここに居場所がある」という公的な承認のように感じられていた。
そのため、それを失ったことは、単なるカードや資格の喪失ではなかった。
「もうここには必要とされていないのではないか」という感覚さえ生まれた。
同じ時期に、日本の家も売却した。
法的なつながりと、物理的なつながりがほぼ同時に失われたことで、自分の一部が強制的に終わらされたように感じた。
その痛みは、今も残っている。
日本語には 居場所（いばしょ） という言葉がある。
単に「いる場所」という意味ではなく、「自分がここにいてよい」「ここに自分の場所がある」という感覚を含む言葉でもある。
私が失ったと感じていたのは、在留資格だけではなく、この 居場所 だったのかもしれない。



そんな中、家の近くの竹林や田んぼの間を歩いていた時、蓮の花が咲く場所に出会った。
蓮（はす） は、仏教を象徴する代表的な花である。
根は泥の中にある。
濁った水を通って伸びる。
そして水面の上に、鮮やかで美しい花を咲かせる。
大切なのは、蓮が泥を否定していないということである。
泥がなければ、蓮もない。
仏教の出発点には 苦（く）、すなわち dukkha がある。
人生には苦しみ、不満、喪失、変化がある。
これは 四諦（したい）、すなわち四つの聖なる真理の出発点である。
苦しみがあること。
苦しみには原因があること。
そこから自由になる可能性があること。
そしてそのための道として 八正道（はっしょうどう） が示されること。
蓮そのものが四諦の直接的な象徴というわけではない。
しかし、自分が感じていた喪失と重ねると、その意味は非常に強く感じられた。
泥は消えない。
苦しみも消えない。
それでも、そこから何かが育つ可能性はある。





ここで重要になるのが 無常（むじょう） である。
無常とは、「何も意味がない」ということではない。
むしろ逆である。
物事は大切だからこそ、失われると痛い。
家も、家族も、国も、居場所も、自分の立場も、大切だからこそ、その変化は深く心に響く。
仏教が教えるのは、苦しみを感じないことではない。
変化し続けるものに永遠の安定を求めることの難しさである。
私は日本が自分を形づくったことだけでなく、日本がこれからも同じ形で自分を認め続けてくれることを望んでいた。
そこに執着があった。
そして現実は、それを許さなかった。





ここで思い浮かぶのが、サミュエル・ベケットの『名づけえぬもの』の最後の言葉である。
「進まなければならない。進めない。進もう。」
この言葉は、単純な励ましではない。
「大丈夫だ」「忘れればよい」と言っているのでもない。
進めないほど苦しい。
それでも進む。
その矛盾をそのまま抱える言葉である。
私にとって、それはこの夏の経験にとても近い。
まだ手放せていない。
まだ痛い。
しかし、それでも人生は続く。





武道にも、同じような無常の学びがある。
技は失敗する。
身体は変化する。
師は亡くなる。
道場は閉じる。
組織は変わる。
弟子は去る。
かつてできたことが、できなくなる日も来る。
武道は、ある意味で、無常を身体で学ぶ稽古でもある。
大切なのは、失わないことではない。
失った後も、どう立ち、どう礼をし、どうもう一度始めるかである。
私は以前と同じ形では、日本に「住んでいる人」ではなくなった。
それでも日本は、自分の中に残っている。
言葉の中に。
家族の中に。
習慣の中に。
教育観の中に。
武道の中に。
そして何より、自分がどのように人と関わるかという感覚の中に。
30年近い人生は、在留資格が変わったからといって消えるものではない。
それらは土のように、自分の中に積み重なっている。
泥のように。
そしてその泥から、まだ何かが咲くかもしれない。
進めない。
それでも進もう。
蓮は、花を咲かせるために泥を忘れる必要はない。

---