I’ve been rereading the post I wrote more than three years ago when moving away from Amsterdam. And again I am battling with my possessions. First of all, I am proud to say that this time, I have not accumulated any of the things I complained about last time: no blank notepads, extra pens or liters of shower gel are coming with me. I have even been on a book buying moratorium since the beginning of this year (what is a bit annoying is that a bunch of unread books I had shipped over from Amsterdam were shipped back unread as well, but in the meantime I had bought and read a ton of new books).
Moving is always a good opportunity to evaluate one’s stuff and to purge the unneeded. Most of our possessions have a purely utilitarian aspect and we leave them behind without regrets. But I have to admit that we are leaving with more stuff than we came with. The good news is that I don’t regret it. I was completely taken in by the Japanese sense of esthetics and the beauty of many everyday objects. Did I mention I love Japanese pottery and fabrics and just about anything made of bamboo? I am crazy for bamboo.
The beautiful things we acquired here I truly love and want to keep in my life. Also: they are unique to Japan and I can’t get them anywhere else. So it makes totally sense to me to ship them to the other side of the world. On top of the things that we bought through the years here, we even bought some more things before leaving. In short: also our next home will have a Japanese touch.
In case I got you curious, these are some of the things we are taking along: our beautiful tea cups, matcha bowls and sake cups, our lacquerware bowls bought in Kisohirazawa, the amazing bamboo picnic basket, a number of bamboo baskets and vases, our zabuton sitting cushions, various tenugui which have decorated our walls and noren for our doorways, wind chimes we collected from all over Japan and the market at the Kawasaki Daishi, and the list goes on… Now it finally pays back that I kept all the boxes and padding materials every time we bought something in the last three years ;-).
From Tokyo with Love
September 10, 2011 by sevenbrane
[…] three years earlier. Since then, we’ve been decorating our new home in Geneva with the things we brought along from Japan, sometimes missing Japan. We are intending to do an extended trip to Japan in 2012 and […]