An interview with Lewis Miesen

Escaping Texas, becoming Canadian, and moving to Japan

I first met Lewis Miesen on a critical mass bike ride in Vancouver about 6 years ago. I’ve always known him to be a perceptive observer and a well-intentioned hippie. As we were both fellow oddball American escapees with a passion for getting around by bike, we hit it off right away.

Lewis and his wife Shizuka are both genuine people who prefer to interact face to face, and met while Lewis was taking care of the Jimi Hendrix shrine in Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver. They later went on some extensive backpacking trips together, traversing Peru, hiking through New Zealand, and encountering some truly strange scenarios in India (my favorite involves some very strong hashish, and a holy man devouring snake venom).

After living together in Vancouver for a few years, they moved to Dawson City, Yukon, for a year, so that Shizuka could attend a nature-focused art school. While there, Lewis did various jobs through the -40 C winter, occasionally frequenting a gold rush-era saloon that’s famous for its jar of liquor which contains a severed human toe.

After finishing her program, rather than go back to Vancouver, Shizuka convinced Lewis to return home to Japan with her. They now live together in a suburb of Kyoto, where Lewis teaches English at an Australian private college.

Lewis was temporarily back in Vancouver to receive his Canadian citizenship. On a grim December afternoon, we met up at a cafe on Commercial Drive, where we caught up, and I interviewed him. We talked about his exodus out of America, why Canada is like a hotel, and his perspective on life in Japan. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What brought you to Canada?

Lewis: I was originally just trying to escape Texas. To get out, I looked at different options and schools in the northeast, but they were all prohibitively expensive. My dad said, “you need a $50K scholarship if you want to go to one of those place.”

Canada was affordable, for a good quality university, and I also wanted to learn French. I knew if I stayed in Texas I wouldn’t survive, and I had to go somewhere.

Why wouldn’t you survive?

Lewis: People in Texas finally get it now why I left, why I was uncomfortable with the politics, the hierarchies, the inequality, the psychological constraints…you know I’m a weirdo, I’ll talk to anyone, and for many Texans I knew, they wouldn’t talk to restaurant workers, [the attitude is] it’s their role to serve, don’t engage with them on a human level. People lack curiosity and patience.

The south in general is based on hierarchy, being a powerful person, being a big person—even all the southern rappers wear stupid Gucci shit all the time, and that’s all they rap about, having nice clothes, a nice car, and I think it’s just a reflection of the society. Hip hop just reflects those values in a very blunt way, but that’s basically what I grew up around: you gotta be one of these important people, hustle and work hard, and whoever’s loudest and most confident is right.

I like to listen and observe, I don’t think I know everything, and I don’t think we can know everything. And so just this arrogance, that the world is completely understandable and we ourselves are the centre of it is kind of stupid, this is the mindset of a lot of Texans, a lot of Americans.

Canada was probably the best move I could have made at the time, and I didn’t go into debt to come here or anything like that. This chai is pretty frothy.

Many years ago, the writer Yann Martel said “Canada is the world’s greatest hotel.” What do you think of that?

Lewis: Yeah, well..in the sense that things are supposed to be somewhat neutral—a hotel doesn’t have very eclectic art, it’s just generic, comfortable, trying to be sophisticated. So that’s somewhat true, Canada is like a hotel, it doesn’t have a strong personality, but by having this kind of empty space, it makes room for many kinds of people to be themselves, and many immigrants feel at home here because it’s kind of a blank slate, as the Canadian palate is not especially strong and domineering. Though it’s hard for me to talk about that, as I’m having culture shock coming back here, and even as I’m about to become part of this country, so I can’t say much about what is Canada nationality or personhood.

And on that note, how’s it going for you since you moved to Japan a year ago?

Lewis: I went originally because my wife is Japanese and I’m always up for an adventure. I think for us, we felt that we didn’t want to come back to Vancouver and didn’t see our lives getting better here. There are opportunities in Dawson City, but it’s remote and you have to deal with some rednecks, so we said, let’s try something new and see how it goes, we can always go back.

For me personally, I was at a time in my life when I could accept living in Japan. Japan is very rule-centric, I feel someone in their 20s wouldn’t really like it there, you have to start lower on the chain. I think it’s a place you can enjoy when you get older, you get better service and more comfort, but if you want rawness, that’s the opposite of the place you want to go to.

You’re kind of a hippie, and you’ve had some very adventurous times in life, I’d say. How do you square this aspect of yourself with the rules based society and conformity in Japan?

Lewis: It’s totally about conforming, and being bland and sterile—you see everyone on the train wearing either a grey suit or a blue suit and either a white shirt or a blue shirt. It’s kind of like bad rendering, like everyone just got 2 or 3 skins.

But that could be said for a lot of Asia. As a foreigner, I’m not expected to know the rules, they just don’t know where to put you on the hierarchy, if you’re an important person or not. If I wasn’t around some international people and had some access to diversity through them, I think it would be hell, but because you can just walk away from those circumstances where everyone is following the script, you can have a good time.

Conversely, here in Canada and North America, we have less rules, but we have to deal with the background stress of everyone doing their own thing, and people following their own ideas of what’s right or wrong. Some people throw their cigarettes and trash on the ground, other people don’t, society is divided because you don’t have a standard script. I thought that was fine until I lived in Japan, where things are predictable, and it’s one less background thing you have to keep in the back of your mind.

You can leverage your bullshit jobs in Canada to get a much better job in Japan, because the pool of people who can do what you do is smaller (ed. note—especially when it comes to teaching English), and the demand is still quite high, and there’s a very lucrative Escape from Japan industry right now, so anyone who wants to learn English, go abroad, they need teachers to help them do that. I’d say most educated young people in Japan feel kind of hopeless, so going abroad is the easiest option to get away from some of the worst aspects of the society.

Nowadays, there’s many articles and YouTubers all highlighting that life as a foreigner in Japan can be very good, particularly because rents and property prices have soared in the rest of world, but in Japan they’re still astonishingly low.

Lewis: It’s super cheap to live there. In North America we really suck a building things, construction, infrastructure, transit, it takes forever to do simple things, but in Japan they’re really good at that. There’s so much housing available, there’s actually too much. There’s abandoned houses no one wants, and tower blocks built in the 70s that are ugly as hell, but they’re affordable and still in good condition, and train lines going everywhere, because the government invests a high percentage of GDP in transit, so there’s so many places you could live and still have access to a city or an airport, whereas in Vancouver there’s no high speed train out to Hope or Squamish or anything like that, you have to drive, so it’s very comfortable there.

With your money you can go quite far, and the quality of stuff is usually high—if it’s not really low, it’s really high, basically. For example, you could buy cheap chocolate for a dollar, but they’re basically wax and sugar with a bit of coloring, but basically anything typically made in Japan, even pens and pencils, you’re getting a much better product for the same amount of money you could get here.

There's especially a lot of videos now that are about for example, someone who quit a job in North America or Australia, who went to buy an abandoned farmhouse in the countryside, and now has a lot of space in Japan, fixed it up after buying it at an auction. Do you think this kind of thing is fueling escapism?

Lewis: I think it’s definitely a fantasy like, “wow, if you go to Japan you can have a house!” and end of the sentence—that’s the fantasy, you can own property and have a comfortable amount of space, which you can’t here. Probably a lot of people have this kind of fantasy about Japan, and there are also all the people who are nerds who want to go to Japan and get a girlfriend, that was their goal in life, you have a lot of these people around too.

It’s weird to think it’s the place where your dreams can come true. I wouldn’t say Japan is especially great, it’s just that it’s not what many countries are these days, which is: unaffordable, violent, dirty, dysfunctional. Per capita, there’s probably more racists in Japan than here, but they’re quiet and don’t bother you, whereas here every idiot wants to tell you about the latest conspiracy theory they’ve heard and they’re in your face about it. So Japan is back in time, like we’re living in the 1990s still, and one of the benefits of the 90s is stuff is still affordable.

And how about some of the drawbacks?

Lewis: Japan is stable from a crime perspective, but there’s still a lot of oppression and inequality. Women aren’t full citizens, everything is clean and packaged to look good, but once you take a step beyond the surface there often isn’t anything there. In high school I wondered why people wanted to be an emo and fit in like that, but Japan is more about looking professionally competent like everyone else.

Forging your own destiny isn’t a big value there, it’s more like: pick an elevator and stay on the same elevator even if it’s broken. I know a lot of people, who I tell them, “you could start your own business and I’ll give you some money to get it off the ground,” but they say, “oh..no, I need to keep working for 15 years under-wage, and then I can do it,” they’re unwilling to roll the dice and go for it.

For me, leaving Texas was a big gamble, and everyone thought I was totally crazy for doing it, my dad said “Canada? That’s not America.”

There’s just this disbelief, that you’re doing something outlandish. But now a lot of people say that was a really good move.

How is homelessness dealt with in Japan vs here?

Lewis: I don’t think anyone who is lacking money is lacking housing there, because of the cheap housing, it’s uncommon. Psychologically, mental illness is not talked about, hospitals are not known for being empathic or humanitarian. Some of these people do get pushed to the boundaries. You can camp at roadside stations at night in your car, so you’ll see a lot of marginalized people doing that, and some of them are a bit off.

Last year, when I biked across Japan, from Kyoto down to Kyushu, (ed. note—an adventure which we would like to hear about in greater detail!) I met a guy who told me his best friend is a ninja who lives in a park in Hawaii. I’ve seen some meth-ed out people in Japan too, like I was turning a corner in this one forest, and this guy’s mouth was bleeding while he was talking into a broken phone. On the surface, everything looks fine, but if you dig deeper you see that people are underpaid, depressed, unsatisfied, and not able to see when they’re being taken advantage of, or really able to comment on any social policies or conditions in the rest of the world.

Here, people are allowed to tear up the social contract in front of you everyday, shooting up and throwing their dirty needles on the ground, and you can’t criticize them, or people will say you’re not being compassionate. In Japan, the police are already there and dealing with it. I’m not against them shooting up, I just don’t want them to do it on transit or in the middle of the street with drugs of questionable purity.

We should focus on the core issues—housing and addressing mental illness. Compassion is a way of coping with the reality now, but it doesn’t help you get out of it. Canadians always want to be the good guy, but sometimes you need to be the bad guy to be the good guy.

And then there’s India, which you’ve traveled through in the past..

Lewis: India is the ultimate chaos-world, there’s no rules, but there’s always a way to get things done. It’s not about making a schedule and sticking with it, it’s about being totally flexible, and somehow it will work out. And it usually does.