Forrest says that in big cities, "playfulness" may be more important than "being cool".

About one year after his 2 month stay in Japan, I asked Forrest what still lingers in his mind from his trip. Here is the transcript of our chat:

Forrest.

Hey.

You came to Japan about a year ago for a couple months.

You’ve been back in America for a year.

What scenes or places or things or ideas that you experienced while you were in Japan, now one year later, what, what things are kind of lingering in your mind, uh, or coming back to you, images that you, that keep coming back to you, from your time here? Is there? Do you have things like that?

Yeah. I think I could wrap it all up under one theme, and that would be that…well, let me put it this way. In this country, and in Philadelphia where I live, there is this um there there’s this unspoken fear of not being cool, right, and it may well be very prevalent in Tokyo. Uh, I’m sure it is to some degree. But what I observed like just noticing the way that the bookstores present themselves, and um just walking around through different parts of Tokyo, and over in Mount Takao and Kyoto and Nara, where we went. There’s this innocence, there’s this um, there’s like this playfulness to their graphic design and to their um, the way they uh have mascots for the police, there’s a police fairy, um, on all sorts of signs outside the stations, um.

Right. Police fairies.

Going to the grocery store and looking at the the faces and the cartoon characters on the foods. Um I was really drawn to this sweet, sort of friendly atmosphere that the whole, you know, at least all of Tokyo seems to create all around it and I think it goes a little further than that because I’ve never felt so safe walking around anywhere in my life. The first night we arrived in Tokyo we missed our train home, so we walked four hours from Roppongi back to our place in…Darrow, what was our…

First place? Koenji.

Koenji. Ah, lovely Koenji. Yes. And so that was a four hour walk. And it was…we got home at like five a.m. but you know we went through some alleys you know luckily our maps app was showing us where to go but we went through some places that in Philadelphia like I would have liked to have had a bodyguard with me. But in Tokyo cutting through this place, I’ll never forget looking down this one pathway and saying to Chase and Natalie, my brother and girlfriend, “Hey, who’s that person just standing there?” And then it turns out it’s a friendly police officer just standing in his position, just making sure everything goes well throughout the night, and he was very kind to us. You know, that’s the level of you know dedication that they put into safety and um you know just making sure everyone is able to have a good time and get home and wake up the next morning safe. I really appreciated that. I thought that was fantastic and it definitely makes me want to come back.