It’s been a few days since I got back from a two-week trip to Japan. My suitcase has long been unpacked, the laundry is done, and the photos have settled into their place on my phone. But something inside me still hasn’t fallen 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 go away.

It turns out there’s a name for it: reverse culture shock. Japan is by far the frontrunner here: the state you experience upon returning is even unofficially called the “post-Japan blues.” You can find plenty of posts and articles about it online.

Culture Shock’s Quiet Sibling

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

What’s more, you don’t have to have lived abroad for years to feel it. Two weeks is enough — especially if the place you visited is somewhere like Japan, where every detail of daily life operates in a radically different way from your own country.

What Japan Does to a Person

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

If a train is said to leave at 14:03, it leaves at 14:03; punctuality isn’t a goal, it’s the default. On the train, no one talks loudly on the phone; people either speak in whispers or don’t speak at all. I also traveled between cities. I rode the Shinkansen. Tokyo to Osaka is 515 kilometers — think of it as about 50 km more than the distance between Istanbul and Ankara — and the train covers that distance in two and a half hours, practically flying through it with a “whoosh.” No jolts, no delays, no “the line is unavailable on this section” slowdowns. You can’t help comparing it with our high-speed train (YHT); you spend half the route at half speed, because the line isn’t suited to that speed everywhere. Over there, the infrastructure lives up to the train’s promise. What the business card calls a “high-speed train” is genuinely a high-speed train.

Say you’re at a train station. In Shinjuku, for instance, the directional signs don’t abandon you halfway, sending you down one path only to leave you stranded. From the exit number to the platform color, from the lines on the floor to the arrows on the walls, every step has the next one waiting for you. The person who designed the signage didn’t just say “they’ll figure it out somehow”; they thought ahead about every point where you might get lost and placed an answer there. Without knowing the language, guided by intelligent design, you make your way from the world’s busiest station straight to the exit. (Sure, it feels super confusing at first, until you understand the system, it takes a while.)

Say you’re shopping. At Uniqlo or 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 easiest route to the elevator on another floor or walk you there themselves. The answer is ready before you’ve even finished walking. No one says “let me check” and then vanishes, leaving you hanging. And this attention isn’t mechanical either: the salespeople are genuinely, sincerely interested in you; your need is met before you’ve even voiced it. There’s a name for this: 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 is important: 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, for commission, or because they expect a tip — not at all; they’re attending to you because being of service is the honor of their job. There’s no pushiness, no pressure to sell; there are just people who stay by your side until your problem is solved, and who bow and thank you once it is. What we call user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) isn’t the work of a single department there — it’s the culture itself. Omotenashi is the name of that culture.

But is this refinement limited to behind the counter? No — the ordinary person on the street has the same reflex. Once, in one of those labyrinthine spots where a station merges with a shopping mall, I went up a floor, lost my starting point, and found myself on some unrelated floor. I asked someone there where my starting point was — they didn’t just give directions; two people came down two floors with me and brought me all the way to the exact spot I’d mentioned. They dropped their own tasks, expecting nothing in return, just so a lost foreigner could be at ease. That’s when I understood that omotenashi isn’t a service standard; it’s a default setting between people.

In Japan, your path always leads you to a ‘konbini’ (convenience store): Lawson, FamilyMart, 7-Eleven… There’s one roughly every 20–30 meters, and inside them isn’t just snacks but everything you might need in the moment. Did it start raining? Umbrellas and raincoats are right by the door. Is the sun beating down? UV-protective arm covers and sunscreen are on the shelf. It’s as if someone thought, “what might this person be missing today?” and arranged the store accordingly. The freshness on the shelves is a whole other matter: the fruit looks as though it’s been inspected one by one. And it’s not just about appearance: konbini food is genuinely fresh and genuinely delicious. An onigiri or a bento you grab off the shelf, an ekiben you snatch at the station — these aren’t in the “well, it’s store food, it’ll do” category; they’re things you sit down and enjoy, and buy again the next day. Products nearing their expiration date are instantly discounted and pulled from the shelf; even a konbini you walk into at midnight is as tidy as if it had just opened. 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 go about your day, something whose absence you only notice once you’re back home: the bathroom worry. You walk into any shopping mall or electronics store; on the 1st floor, the 3rd floor, sometimes the 5th floor, there’s always a spotless, heated, washlet-equipped toilet waiting for you. For someone with a sensitive stomach, this is a comfort that’s hard to describe: that constant “where do I go if something happens” calculation running in the back of your mind as you wander the city disappears completely. Once your mind is freed from that anxiety, the day flows entirely differently.

Every minute, what remains from all of this is a single holistic feeling: cleanliness and a smoothly functioning order. The streets are clean, the toilets are clean, the train seats are clean; queuing isn’t a rule, it’s a reflex. Rules that are set are followed — period. Rules aren’t broken over petty calculations; that familiar culture of cutting corners — changing lanes with a “nothing will happen,” slipping past the queue, taking a shortcut wherever there’s an opening — is nowhere to be found. 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. This culture is built from childhood: at school, students clean their own classrooms, hallways, even their toilets themselves — in the term we know from military service, “area cleaning” is an official part of education. A child who cleans up their own mess doesn’t throw trash on the street when they grow up; the formula is that simple.

Systems don’t run late, promises are kept, nothing is left at the “good enough” 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 and can focus on your life.

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

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

What Happens When You Return

In my first hours after landing in Istanbul, everything felt less orderly, poorly signposted, noisy, and chaotic to me. People shouting at the top of their lungs. People watching videos out loud on their phones. Endless roadworks everywhere: excavations all around. Sidewalks torn up, roads striped off, infrastructure work in one corner, some never-ending construction in another. It’s as if the city lives with a permanent “under construction” sign. In Japan, over two weeks, I almost never came across a scene like this — of course there was construction there too, roads being resurfaced. But it was finished and done by midnight. Here, digging is accepted as a natural part of daily life.

On public transport, the difference makes itself known within the first minute. On my second day back, two people behind me on the bus were chatting at the top of their lungs, as if there were an entire town square between them — a scene I never once encountered in two weeks in Japan. That same day, just as I stepped onto a 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 pedestrian crossings… Over there, I was so sure the cars would stop that I’d cross without looking; here, crossing the street without a brush with death even when the light is green counts as a small victory.

I’m also experiencing the typical symptoms of reverse culture shock:

• A sudden intolerance toward everyday behaviors in your own country
• A constant state of comparison that begins with “over there it was like this, but…”
• Being caught between the urge to tell people and the feeling that “no one understands”
• A slight emptiness, even melancholy — something deeper than the sadness of a vacation ending
• Feeling as though the order you’d adapted to has been taken away from you

All of this is normal. In fact, according to researchers, the greater your admiration for the country you visited, the more pronounced your reverse culture shock. In my case, this admiration has a foundation going back years: I greatly admire Japanese anime, series, and design sensibility. The streets, vending machines, konbinis, train station announcements, and cherry blossom trees along the school route that I’d watched on screen for years… When I set foot in Japan, I hadn’t stepped into a foreign country but rather 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 of it: when I returned to my actual home, I felt distanced from home.

So, doctor, what’s the cure?

Since the transition is still very new, I’ll update this part later. But none of what I’ve written here has any connection to the economy or anything of the sort. We don’t have to wear a sour face; we can do our work meticulously and with a smile. We can offer heartfelt thanks while also maintaining professionalism. Until then, I’ll give myself time.

Every year, millions of people return from Japan, and a significant portion of them wrestle with exactly this feeling. Reading other people’s return posts online and coming across sentences that make you think “oh, it’s like I wrote this myself” is a comfort in itself. I wasn’t alone after all — and that’s a good thing. By the way, I don’t agree with the frequently given advice to “ease the longing by going to Japanese restaurants back home”: going to an imitation harms the original. I’d rather keep that taste stored 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 returned 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. 🙂