Back in April, 2025, I had to please to travel to Japan for the first time in my life. It had been a dream of mine for years, and I still feel extremely gratified that I was finally able to realise it.

It was quite an overwhelming experience; when you come from a relatively small country of only six million people, being in the most populous city in the world, can be quite intimidating!

It was an absolutely amazing experience, however, and I dearly hope that I might be able to return to Japan someday. Maybe in a couple of years or so.

But since I have returned to Denmark again, I have ruminated a bit on how my visit to Japan might have inspired me, in a literary sense.

I have never written about Japan or Japanese culture, specifically, though I have consumed quite a bit of media from there.

And I do not have any immediate plans of writing a story that could take place in a Japanese setting, either.

But, I think that my experience of travelling to Japan - all the sights, the culture, the people and everything else - might serve as an inspiration in a more subconscious way.

Because I do think that all of our accumulated experiences in our life can serve as inspiration, even thought we might not apply those experiences directly into our creative work.

And I would certainly consider my vacation to Japan to be one of my greatest life-experiences!

'Write what you know, and write who you are," is the phrase as I have heard it. And my vacation to Japan is certainly a part of me and who I am now, and my own story, and so in that sense, will also be a part of what I am going to write going forward.