It’s been a few days since I got back from a two-week trip to Japan. But something inside me still hasn’t settled back into place. That strange feeling that started the moment I walked out of the airport — as if I’d arrived in my own country as a tourist — just won’t pass.

It turns out this has a name: reverse culture shock. Japan is the runaway favorite here: the version people go through on their way back is even informally called the “post-Japan blues.” You’ll find plenty of posts and articles about it online.

The Quiet Sibling of Culture Shock

We all know culture shock: you go to a foreign country, everything is different, and you flounder. Reverse culture shock is its less-talked-about but sometimes more jarring counterpart. You feel it when you return to your own country — because no one prepares you for it. When you head somewhere foreign you expect difficulty; when you come home you don’t. And that’s exactly where the trap lies.

And you don’t need to have lived abroad for years for this to happen. Even two weeks is enough — especially when the place you visited is somewhere like Japan, a country where every detail of daily life works in a radically different way from your own.

What Japan Does to You

Over the two weeks I spent in Japan, I got used to something without even noticing: predictability.

If the train is said to leave at 14:03, it leaves at 14:03; punctuality isn’t a goal, it’s the default. No one in the carriage is shouting into their phone; people either speak in a whisper or don’t speak at all. I traveled between cities, too. I rode the Shinkansen. Tokyo to Osaka is 515 kilometers — picture roughly 50 km more than the Istanbul–Ankara distance — and the train covers it in two and a half hours, practically going “whoosh.” No jolt, no delay, no “the line isn’t available on this stretch” slowdown. You can’t help comparing it to our own high-speed train (YHT); you spend half the route at half speed, because the track isn’t built for that speed everywhere. There, the infrastructure matches the train’s promise exactly. It’s called a “high-speed train,” and it really is one.

Say you’re in a train station. In Shinjuku, for instance, the wayfinding signs don’t leave you stranded halfway, sending you one way and then vanishing. From exit numbers to platform colors, from lines on the floor to arrows on the wall, at every step the next sign is waiting for you. Whoever designed the signage didn’t shrug and think “eh, they’ll figure it out”; they anticipated every point where you might get lost and placed an answer there. Without knowing the language, with a bit of help from AI, you find the right exit out of the busiest station in the world. (It does feel super confusing at first, of course — it takes a while to understand the system.)

When you step from the station out onto the street, people don’t walk into you either; when you reach a crosswalk, the cars actually stop — you’re so sure of it that you don’t even feel the need to turn your head and check. There are no trash cans on the street, yet not a single piece of litter on the ground. Thirsty? A vending machine every few steps: cold water, hot coffee, tea, juice — whatever you want, right there on the corner, spotless and working. Staying thirsty in Japan is almost a skill in itself.

When you reach your hand out to a sensor faucet, water flows. It’s nothing like the faucets back home that make me feel bad and doubt myself, the ones that need me to wave my hand around like a lunatic. Something simply working the way it’s supposed to. A small but lovely luxury.

Say you’re hungry and you step into a tiny restaurant on one of the streets those signs led you to. The table space is minuscule — but everything has been thought through. A napkin is right at hand, water comes before you even ask, and the chopsticks are waiting in a little drawer at the edge of the table. The moment a flicker of hesitation crosses your face about where to sit or how to order, someone comes over right away and shows you. You order from a picture menu, so there are no surprises, and there’s nothing to panic about when it comes to where to pay either; the system carries you. Few square meters, a great deal of thought.

Before boarding the train in Osaka, I’d bought a dessert. When I opened the box on the train, what did I find? Since the dessert was milk-based, they’d even tucked a small ice pack inside so it wouldn’t spoil.

Right at this point my mind can’t help drifting to how things are back home: the food-delivery orders that never arrive despite what I clearly wrote in the notes, the effort I spend just to describe what I want… There, everything was placed in front of me, thought out before I even asked; here, I can’t even get what I spelled out in writing. The contrast is that sharp.

Say you’re shopping. At Uniqlo, at Yodobashi, you ask a staff member a question; using the phone in their hand and the intercom in their ear, they check stock within seconds, and if needed they either point you toward the elevator on another floor if it’s simple, or walk there with you if it’s complicated. The answer is ready while you’re still walking. No one says “let me check” and then disappears, leaving you stranded. And this attentiveness isn’t mechanical: the staff genuinely engage with you, with a crystal-clear sincerity; you find your need met before you’ve even voiced it. This has a name: omotenashi. Though it’s roughly translated as “hospitality,” it’s actually something far deeper — the art of anticipating a guest’s need before the guest has even expressed it, and meeting it without expecting anything in return. The “without expecting anything in return” part matters: there’s no tipping culture in Japan; in fact, trying to leave a tip can even be considered rude. So that salesperson isn’t attending to you to close a sale, and certainly not because they expect a commission or a tip; they attend to you because caring for you is the honor of their work. No pushiness, no rush to sell; just people who stay by your side until your problem is solved, and who then bow and thank you once it is. What we call user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) isn’t the job of some department there, it’s the culture itself. Omotenashi is the name of that culture.

So is this thoughtfulness limited to behind the counter? No — ordinary people on the street have the same reflex. Once, at one of those labyrinth-like spots where a station merges with a mall, I went up a floor, got lost right at the start, and found myself on some unrelated level. I asked someone there for my starting point — they didn’t settle for just describing it; two people came down two floors with me and brought me all the way to the exact spot I’d mentioned. They dropped what they were doing, expecting nothing in return, just so a lost stranger could feel at ease. In that moment I understood that omotenashi isn’t a service standard; it’s a default setting between people.

In Japan your path always runs into a ‘konbini’: Lawson, FamilyMart, 7-Eleven… There’s one roughly every 20–30 meters, and inside them sits not just snacks but pretty much everything you might need at that moment. Did the rain start pouring? Umbrellas and rain ponchos by the door. Is the sun a concern? UV-protective arm sleeves and sunscreen on the shelf. It’s as if someone thought “what might this person be missing today?” and arranged the shop accordingly. The freshness on the shelves is a whole other matter: the fruit looks as though it’s been inspected piece by piece. And it’s not just for show: konbini food is genuinely fresh and genuinely delicious. An onigiri you grab off the shelf, a bento, an ekiben you snatch at the station — these aren’t in the “eh, it’s convenience-store food, it’ll do” category; they’re things you sit down and enjoy, then buy again the next day. Items nearing their expiration date are immediately discounted and pulled from the shelf; even a konbini you walk into at midnight is as tidy as if it had just opened that morning. And at the register, the transaction ends with a mutual ceremony of thanks.

There’s one more thing that never occupies a corner of your mind as you roam around all day, and whose absence you only notice once you’re back: the toilet worry. You walk into any mall, any electronics store; on the 1st floor, the 3rd, sometimes the 5th, a spotless, heated, washlet toilet is always waiting for you. For someone with a sensitive stomach, this is a hard-to-describe relief: that constant “where do I go if something happens” calculation running in the back of your mind as you move through the city vanishes entirely. Once your mind is freed from that worry, the day flows completely differently.

What remains from all of this, every single minute, is one holistic feeling: cleanliness and an order that runs like clockwork. The streets are clean, the toilets are clean, the train seats are clean; getting in line isn’t a rule, it’s a reflex. The rule that’s set is followed — full stop. Rules aren’t broken over petty calculations; that familiar culture of cutting corners — changing lanes with an “oh, nothing will happen,” slipping in beside the queue, taking a shortcut wherever a gap appears — simply isn’t there. At a red light, at midnight, on a completely empty street, people still wait; because the rule exists not because someone is watching, but because that’s simply how it is. I’d say this culture is instilled early. While I was there, groups of students led by a teacher were combing the sidewalks with tongs in hand, hunting for litter, picking up whatever they found with those tongs and dropping it into the trash bag they carried. Someone who learns this won’t litter later in life; the formula is that simple.

Systems don’t run late, promises are kept, nothing is left at the “it’ll do” level. After a while you stop noticing it — because your mind no longer expects things to break down. And that’s the real habit: an order in which you feel no anxiety, in which you can focus on your own life.

None of what I’ve described is a big deal on its own. But when it repeats over two weeks, every day, hundreds of times a day, your nervous system recalibrates. You get tuned to a frequency without noise, without chaos, without uncertainty.

Then you board a plane, and within a few hours you’re expected to return to your old frequency.

What Happens When You Return?

In the first hours after landing in Istanbul, everything felt less orderly, poorly signposted, loud, chaotic to me. People talking at the top of their lungs. People watching videos out loud on their phones. Endless roadworks everywhere: the whole place dug up. Sidewalks torn out, roads coned off, infrastructure work on one corner, a never-ending construction site on the next. It’s as if the city lives under a permanent “under construction” sign. Over two weeks in Japan I barely came across a scene like this — of course there was construction there too, roads were being paved. It was finished and done by midnight. Here, though, digging has been accepted as a natural part of daily life.

On public transport the difference shows itself within the first minute, too. On my second day back, two people behind me on the bus were chatting at full volume, as if there were an entire town square between them — a scene I hadn’t come across even once in two weeks in Japan. That same day, the moment I stepped onto the bus, the driver hit the gas. Here, grabbing onto a bus that pulls away while your foot is still on the step has practically become a reflex. And the crosswalks… There I was so sure the vehicles would stop that I’d cross without even looking; here, making it across without a near-crushing — even while the light is green — counts as a small victory.

I’m going through the classic symptoms of reverse culture shock, too:

• A sudden intolerance for the everyday behaviors of your own country
• A constant comparing that begins with “But there it was like this…”
• Being caught between the urge to tell people about it and the feeling that “no one gets it”
• A faint emptiness, even a sadness — something deeper than the end-of-vacation blues
• The feeling that the order you’d adapted to has been taken away from you

All of this is normal. In fact, researchers say the greater your admiration for the country you visited, the more pronounced the reverse culture shock. In my case, that admiration has a foundation going back years: I’m very fond of Japanese anime and their sense of design. The streets, the vending machines, the konbini, the train-station announcements, the sakura trees along the way to school that I watched on screen for years… When I set foot in Japan, I hadn’t entered a foreign country so much as stepped into a universe I’d been watching for years. Walking through Akihabara, experiencing that world I knew from the screen in three dimensions, what I felt was something beyond being a tourist — a kind of homecoming. And that’s the irony: when I returned to my actual home, I felt as though I’d moved away from home.

So, Doctor, What’s the Cure?

Since my return is still quite recent, I’ll update this section later. But none of what I’ve written here has anything to do with the economy or the like. We don’t have to look sour-faced; we can do our work meticulously and with a smile. We can thank people sincerely and maintain professionalism at the same time. Until then, I’ll give myself some time.

Every year millions of people return from Japan, and a significant share of them wrestle with exactly this feeling. Reading other people’s homecoming posts online and coming across sentences that make you go “oh, it’s like I wrote this myself” is a consolation all on its own. Turns out I’m not alone — and that’s nice. By the way, I don’t agree with the oft-given advice to “ease the longing by going to Japanese restaurants at home”: going to an imitation only spoils the original. I’d rather keep that taste preserved in my memory in its original form until the next time. I’ll adapt 🙂

Reverse culture shock isn’t actually a bad thing; it’s proof that a trip genuinely changed you. If I’d come back feeling nothing, those two weeks would have amounted to nothing more than photographs. Discomfort is the shadow of learning.

Japan taught me something, and the journey back was an invitation to build a bridge between what I’d learned and my own life. Right now I’m standing on that bridge. It sways a little, yes — but the view is beautiful. 🙂