Coming back to Sweden, it always takes time to get used to be in what used to me my home country. After a week or two I feel quite at home but when arriving I always feel a bit like a tourist coming to visit another country. The people look different, the customs are different, everything is different from the everyday life I have gotten used to after spending the biggest part of the past seven years in Japan. Society as well as the cityscape has of course also changed, and not living in a country makes it difficult to keep up with the changes you otherwise would have slowly day by day seen and got accustomed to. So as strange as it sounds to me, I feel like I am in for a bit of a culture shock when I go back home.
Long before coming to Sweden my son started to talk about what he wanted to do and eat here. He was very specific and determined. He wanted to eat fruits yogurt and many slices of a round softish kind of bread, and he wanted to play in the snow and go the ICA MAXI. ICA MAXI is a big supermarket chain in Sweden where you can buy everything from groceries to toys to clothes to kitchen utensils. If anybody asks my wife or son what they like best about Sweden, they both answer ICA MAXI. Going shopping there with his grandmother is the favorite activity in Sweden for my son, and as soon as we arrived here the week before Christmas, my son wanted to go to ICA MAXI with my mother. My wife also wanted to go so I tagged along and thought I would stock up on some of my favorite licorice candy that is impossible to get my hands on in Japan. But rather than going to the candy section, I ended up in front of the dairy products.
I remember the sour milk with the Japanese name from when I was young. That onaka means stomach in Japanese I did not know, but I really liked the name and thought it very cool that you could by a dairy product called Onaka in Sweden. Now some decades later I know that onaka is the Japanese word for stomach and I still think it is cool with a Swedish filmjölk having a Japanese name. If it was an unconscious part of me searching for something to ease the transition to a new environment, or if it was just that my curiosity to explore a supermarket I have not set foot in for a year I do not know, but suddenly I found myself having put one liter of Onaka sour milk and one liter of yogurt with supposedly Japanese taste in the cart. At checkout I was thinking of the mutual fascination between Sweden and Japan that I feel exists. So many similarities and at the same time two so different worlds. And I feel so lucky to be able to live in both of them.
Share this story: