Three years ago now I landed in Japan (for the second time) to start my PhD at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. I didn’t know if it was going to be a purely short-term gig or if I was going to remain, at least for a while, in the land of the rising sun (and Skylark group unlimited drink bars). All I knew was that was that it had taken me a year to get here, and a few more plus some change of hoping and fantasizing about a sojourn abroad. After the exams and the endless writing and rewriting of research plans and the waves of disappointment that came with the rejection letters from universities, I was only happy to finally be flying out.
Between then and now, the days seemed long, but at the same time not at all. Here I am in a new apartment, and already my first official month as a salaryman, a seisha-in, is almost behind me. But just before all that, I had a wonderful few days of transition from what in many ways felt like a temporary exile away from the real world of full-time jobs and adult responsibilities. My parents (along with my father- and brother-in-law) even came over from the Philippines to join the occasion. We showed them our new apartment. We took them to see the Glico Man at Dohtonbori and try out Japanese barbecue and conveyor belt sushi. All the hits – at least what little of it we could afford with a budget heavily constrained by moving expenses.
The graduation ceremony was scheduled for March 24, a day before my mother’s birthday, which made her and dad’s visit all the more significant. I was hoping the cherry blossoms would be in bloom for that day, not just so my parents could catch a glimpse of them during their trip, and not just so the pictures could look amazing, but also because it seemed pretty fitting. Some sakura to bookend my PhD life. Ii, ne? When I arrived here in April 2023, I was greeted coming out of the airport in Nagoya with a great burst of flowers, showering the railways with every gust of wind in soft, white petals, giving a nice anime B-roll to a scene I was already over-romanticizing in my mind. Sadly the trees stayed barren as the fall had left them, but no matter.
Getting my parents to fly out of the country had always been a dream of mine, ever since I got the opportunity to do it myself. Somehow, despite living amongst families with OFW members, and being friends at school with kids whose families took them to places like Singapore and Hong Kong Disneyland during the summer breaks, I never felt much of an impulse to leave the Philippines. That was until my friends and I got to present an undergraduate paper that we had worked on together in Kyoto. Then I went to Singapore, Taiwan, and then back to Japan to study. Somehow, seeing new places was never enough for me. I wanted them to see what I saw. I wanted their world to grow with mine. So having my mother and father with me at the bridge along the river at Dohtonbori, celebrating my mother’s birthday, while still in the afterglow of my graduation ceremony, I really did feel like I’d accomplished something.
What’s next? That’s the question everyone seems to be asking. The PhD – something I’d talked about doing endlessly to anyone that cared to listen since I had just barely finished my bachelor’s – is really over. And you know what? Sometimes we get too wrapped up and stressed out over the becoming that we forget entirely about the being, about having done. Or at least that’s what Fitzgerald has led me to believe. The answer is I don’t know. When I wrote down my graduate school plans on the Starbucks planner my mom got me every year, I seemed to run out of pages for after. If I’d written anything down elsewhere I must have forgotten all about it.
For the first time in my life though I don’t feel any anxiety at all about the after, or the not knowing thereof. For the first time, at least for a short while, I would like to take on the years one day at a time, and not have some moonshot plan as if I had shareholders to report to during earnings call. I would like to wake up, see my beautiful wife out to work, brew my morning coffee, and sit at my desk facing a window to the street below. I would like to work. I would like to write. I guess that’s what I want the most – to finally come back to my decades-old promise to myself that I will write. It’s funny: during our teens and twenties we like to think of our lives as having these grand story arcs, but I guess once we reach the threshold to our thirties we realize that arcs end, in good or bad, but the story goes on regardless – and that’s the good part. You don’t always have to be working towards some grand finale.
The difference in scenery couldn’t be any more palpable. My dormitory at the university was situated at the top of a hill, just barely within campus, and neighbored by a large spread of rice field. Because our research required barely any physical presence at the laboratory, I almost never left. I spent morning until afternoon cooped up at my desk, a short distance from the unmade bed I’d come back to at intervals when in need of serious thinking (which I preferred to do horizontally). While I still work remote now for my company, outside my office window is an entire neighborhood of people. Nearby there’s a park where families come in their mini SUVs, kids from the nearby school on their electric bikes, to congregate under the the cherry blossoms and play baseball. There’s a community now. I have human neighbors. My time atop the magic mountain is over, and it’s time to come back to the real world. Thank God I’m only more fortunate than Hans Castorp to not be coming back to a war – not on this side of the world anyway. For now.
Really I had wanted to write more for this series of blogs on the PhD life, but I guess that’s a sign that it had altogether been a good one. I couldn’t even sit down to write about it. So I guess we’ll all have to make do with this half-assed epilogue. On the bright side, with this comes the beginning of something else, something even better, perhaps. I’m just waiting to find out what it is.
Dominic Dayta 
Leave a comment