Japan is obviously not imaginary; it’s a real country, it exists – if you’re looking for countries that don’t exist, Finland is the one you’re looking for 😛. But my Japan is imaginary. I’m dreaming of a Japan that simply is there only in my imagination, being an entirely subjective, partial, and factually extremely flawed version of the realWe’ll come back to this later; it’s intriguing. Japan.
My Japan is no more (or less?) real than the afternoons of my childhood, smelling Greek coffee, and overall constructing a version of a reality that is, shall we use the term, questionable.
Whenever I’m reading about Japan, seeing photos or videos from there – including its huge cat culture, one must admit – I immediately feel calm. I feel a sense of longing for something that, again, isn’t there. More still, it never has; it’s not like I used to live in Japan and now I miss it.
So what does dreaming of Japan – and other imaginary lands – reveals to us about the way our mind wanders?
