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The Scent of Japan
How a simple smell transported me back to my time in Japan
If I had known that the smell of a moisturising cream would be my most vivid reminder of Japan, I would have developed this one trick a long time ago.
In early 2019, I solo travelled to Japan for two weeks as part of my medical school ‘elective’ placement. Spoiler alert — I used it as a holiday. At my departing airport, I bought a travel-sized cocoa-butter moisturising cream, one that I’d never seen or used before. It was going to be pretty cold over in Japan, so I needed some extra protection from my skin drying out.
I mostly applied that cream after showering in the hostels I stayed in, which by the way, turned out to be surprisingly clean.
On returning to London from that trip, I ended up buying a normal-sized bottle of that exact same cocoa-butter cream, throwing it into my gym bag to be applied after post-gym showers. But that’s not all it was useful for.
The first time I opened that bottle of cream in the UK, I was standing in my gym’s locker room, but my mind had been transported somewhere else. The smell of cocoa butter injected a vivid picture into my mind, throwing me back into that first hostel shower room in Japan, where that cream had also been used.
