The first time I tied a memory to a song, I did it by accident.

It was my first trip to Japan and my first trip overseas without my family. I was fifteen and it was 2008. In other words, I had just graduated from bringing one of those portable CD players around to bringing a tiny Creative Zen MP3 player around. I still remember my father and my uncle trying to do the math to convince me that no one was going to need more than 1GB of storage because no one is going to listen to that many songs

And that is how I unintentionally played things on a loop. 

While we were visiting Unzen Jigoku, while we were spending the long bus journeys counting the number of vending machines (the sheer prevalence of it was somehow magical to a fifteen-year-old-me), while my friends were passing around bottles of calpis for the first time (it was new and amazing), while I had my first grape jelly drink, while we were exploring the cobbled streets of Huis ten Bosch, a little piece of Holland transplanted to Japan, I had the same few songs playing. 

One of those songs was Tattoo by Jordin Sparks. It sounds so cheesy but as the lyrics say, by the end of the trip, with all the wonder and discover and friendship-drama involved, Japan had etched itself onto my heart. 

You’re on my heart just like a tattoo

Just like a tattoo I’ll always have you

And when I decided to go to Japan for university, this song became the soundtrack to that journey. Just the opening bars of the song remind me not just of that first trip to Kyushu, but also walking down the leafy road towards the Embassy of Japan, where I applied for and eventually got a scholarship. 

Eventually, the process of applying for the scholarship and my actual trip to Japan got so intertwined that as soon as Tattoo starts playing, I remember both the leafy street that leads to the Embassy of Japan and my first trip there. It feels like one event flows into another, that a decision to choose Japan instead of another country for a school trip lead to over five years of life in Japan. 

With one of my key motivation to go to Japan so intertwined with the first place I visited, is it any wonder that I eventually landed in Kyushu? At the end of my first year in Japan, where I learnt the language in one of quieter suburbs of Tokyo, I chose to go to Kyushu University for the next four years. And it wasn’t just going back to Kyushu to study, my first job after I graduated was at Huis ten Bosch, the very same theme park I visited back when I was fifteen. 

The soundtrack to that part of my life, oddly enough, were podcasts and not music. Even though I rarely brought my golf clubs to the range, I remember diligently listening and even enjoying the Golficity podcast. And I remember pressing my very frail second-hand car up the narrow, sometimes mountainous paths, on my weekend jaunts while listening to the Internet of Things podcast. All very dull sounding subjects to most people, but very strongly connected to my schooling days. 

It was supposed to be the best time in my life. I was newly graduated, employed in the same place that brought me to Japan, and I had the freedom to explore the Nagasaki countryside on my days off. 

But sometimes, childhood dreams are not meant to be and I buckled under the stress of working for too little pay and not enough overtime, moving away from all my university friends, and having to face one person that didn’t like me. Yes, it was just one person in my company but having to hear that my voice was too loud and my face wasn’t pretty when I was already stressed was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So in 2017, I fled back to Singapore just in time to join my family for a trip to England to visit my sister. This was THE trip where I got to show off my planning prowess (in the process scaring every single member of my family with the lengthy guide) and where we planning to drive from London to Manchester with stops along the way at Oxford, Bath, Stratford upon Avon, Birmingham, and such. 

This is where song two comes in. One of my clearest memories of the trip involve the long car rides where we play music, including Ed Sheeran’s Castle on the Hill. For some reason, that song is tied to the stretch of road in the British countryside, with fields on both sides of us. 

I’m on my way

Driving at 90 down those country lanes

I learnt later that when we use music to remember, we often remember not just events but feeling. And perhaps that’s why this song makes me think not only of the freedom of a road trip, but of the sense of cosiness that occurs when everything is right with the world and your family is having fun together. 

And now we reach the 2024. It’s been five years since my last trip to Japan and I have finally gone back to Okinawa with two friends. I didn’t set out to find a “theme song” for the trip but it happened because apparently, there are two songs dominating the airwaves in Japan now.

One song, Aidoru, is the opening song for a popular manga turned anime. To be honest, while I heard that song many times over our week in Okinawa, I associate the anime and hence the song more with one of the friends I made in France. She was the one who told me about this story and recommended it to me. 

And so it’s the other song that I think will symbolise the trip to me. Que Sera Sera is a bubbly and hopeful song about treating yourself even when the current time period may be difficult. It reminds me of 

the morning we spent Whale Watching, where I struck up a conversation with the people next to me. 

ケセラセラ

今日も唱える

限界?上等 やってやろうか

how a university friend flew all the way from Osaka to Okinawa so we could have twenty-four hours to catch up and how we had the best time eating yakitori in the restaurant next to our airbnb. 

Que Sera Sera

I’m singing it again today

Limits? Very good let’s do this

how my friends and I hunted down the few sakura trees, stopped at a coffee farm on the way, and went on the beach with full length mamianqun for pictures. 

Which is why even though by the end of the trip, one friend was so sick of Que Sera Sera that she banned it from the car, I went home to Singapore and played it repeatedly as I drove to work the week after I came back.