The Paris of our dreams

This article was written for April Cools' Club 2025. Last year I wrote about the Ninja Creami.

I usually don't write about anime or my nerdy nostalgia for high school slice-of-life so this was quite a fun change of pace. This essay also ended up being more like a visual essay with all the Youtube video embeddings and pictures. Maybe next year I'll try to make an actual Youtube video essay!

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Once in a while when I wake up
I find myself crying.

The dream I must have had I can never recall.
But... the sensation that I've lost something
lingers for a long time after I wake up.

— Your Name (Kimi no Na wa)

“Akogare no Paris” is a Japanese phrase which means “the Paris of our dreams.” The media and art we consume works to construct an idealized, romantic vision of these places. And the elaborate fantasies exist in our imaginations forever; that is, unless they one day come into contact with reality.

Our imaginary versions can be even more compelling than the real places themselves. Studio Ghibli is famous for creating beautiful, dream-like landscapes. Their extensive filmography features so many stories set in a reimagined Europe, such as Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle. The protagonists go on adventures in quaint 19th-century towns, filled with painstakingly period-accurate architectural details. As Dani Cavallaro writes in The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki, the masterful filmmaker has created:

an elaborately fantasized version of Europe as seen “through Eastern eyes.” Indeed, the setting is essentially a fantastic synthesis of diverse European locations, simultaneously redolent of the Italian Alps, of Bavarian castles, of Mont-Saint-Michel and of the Cote d’Azur.

Miyazaki’s European cityscape in the Howl’s Moving Castle movie
(source: r/architecturalrevival)

Miyazaki’s version of Europe is a blend of fantasy and reality, intended to evoke both nostalgia and a hopeful vision of the future. Somehow he has managed to merge them seamlessly into a cityscape that is both classical and futuristic. Ancient castles together with steampunk machines.

As Studio Ghibli founder and producer Toshio Suzuki shares about the creation of Howl’s Moving Castle:

… the film concurrently visualizes actual elements of 19th-century culture and society, and images of later epochs as envisioned at the time. Suzuki has discussed at some length this aspect of Miyazaki’s latest movie and noted that when Miyazaki was “wondering what period the movie should be set in,” he came up with the 19th-century for the principal reason that he was fascinated with the many artists who “drew ‘illusion art’ in Europe back then…. They drew many pictures imagining what the 20th-century would be like. They were illusions and were never realized after all.” The spellbinding power of such images, for Miyazaki, resides in their ability to conjure up “a world in which science exists as well as magic, since they are illusion,” and in which conventional boundaries separating the rational from the irrational, the measurable from the incommensurable, and fact from fantasy are, consequently, radically undermined.

But what happens when our conjured up worlds come face-to-face with stark reality?

Sometimes, Japanese tourists who visit Paris can feel a disappointment so strong that they can experience states of anxiety, delusion, and derealization. Their encounter with a reality is so different from their imagined experiences that it produces an intense form of culture shock. This psychological phenomenon is known as Paris syndrome, coined in the 1980s by Japanese psychiatrist Hiroaki Ota.

Though the term refers to the experience of Eastern tourists who visit Paris, it can happen to anyone. Just as Japanese visitors to Paris might find a sharp divide between their expectations and the reality of the situation, so too can Westerners visiting Japan.

With the rise of anime’s popularity, international audiences have grown up on stories set in Tokyo and Japanese towns. The anime aesthetic creates a feeling of retroactive nostalgia for so many people who have never even been to Japan. The depictions of the buildings, streets, and trains are so realistic, often almost photoreal replications of real-world locations, that it gives us viewers the sensation that they have been there. Even though we’re millions of miles away, we feel like we’ve been to these place and know them deeply from childhood.

Fans of Japanese media are inexorably driven to visit in person, to take a pilgrimage to see if their mental picture matches up with reality. As Clothilde Sabre writes in French Anime and Manga Fans in Japan:

When dreaming about Japan and going to visit Japan, fans are guided by the specific imaginary composed of elements selected from pop culture, a process that characterises the appropriation of the contents by fans. This imaginary is then shaped by the exotic filter which determines their perception of the country. This exotic aspect plays a large part in the pleasure the fantasyscape can bring. Since fans are constantly immersed in the universe of Japanese pop culture they feel a strong intimacy and familiarity with Japanese culture, even if they have never visited the country. They have a strong longing for Japan, a kind of nostalgic and projective desire that comes from their personal fantasy of Japan and that pushes them to travel and experience the ‘real’ country.

[…]

The idea of a ‘specific nostalgic picture’ of Japan, shared by French tourists who were familiar with Japanese animation on television and inspired by these memories of childhood, is a good example of these specificities. All the French fans share this idea of a golden age of Japanese animation in France and tend to look for the references associated with this period once in Japan.

The gap between expectations and reality can be enormous. It can feel underwhelming when, faced with the actual lived experience of the sights and sounds of Japan, it doesn’t live up to the ideal created by meticulously crafted storytelling. The flawed truth of Tokyo as a city where normal humans live and work can’t compare to the nostalgic perfection in our minds.

Makoto Shinkai is the master of creating deep attachment for every day Japan in the hearts of foreign audiences, just as Miyazaki has built up the dream of a new age Ruritania in Europe for Asian viewers. As this stunning visual compilation shows, the color and detail of Shinkai’s animation so closely mirrors the real world:

And even though it visually mimics locations in the real world, Shinkai’s movies—the most well-known being Your Name, Weathering with You, and Suzume—tell stories filled to the brim with magic realism. The characters struggle against titanic forces of destruction using time travel, magical powers, and transfiguration. His stories explore grand themes of love and destiny in front of a backdrop of a mundane, slice of life existence.

Stunning view of Tokyo with shooting stars from Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) by Makoto Shinkai.

The risk of visiting these places is that the experience of seeing them in real life will not have the same emotional resonance as the same scene filtered through the lens of Shinkai and Miyazaki.

Side-by-side comparison of the iconic staircase from the Your Name movie and real life
(source: r/interestingasfuck)

But it is Shinkai’s Your Name that gives us a blueprint for how we can transcend this crushing disappointment with reality. The movie centers on a teenage boy and girl, Taki and Mitsuha, who each have idealized and stereotyped views of the other’s life. It starts as a classic story of city mouse and country mouse, with all the hijinks that ensue for these two adapting to different lifestyles. Over time, their conflict and viewpoints grow beyond superficial perceptions. Deep empathy and emotional connection create a beautiful relationship that not only helps save a town, but also conquers time and space itself.

When I was younger, I dreamed about being a high school student in Tokyo. The uniforms, the classrooms, the silly and serious drama of school life, I felt like all of minute details had been shown to me by the shows I watched. I cut and paste together the perfect story in my mind. I imagined it all so vividly it sometimes felt like I was already there.

The rooftop is where I would hang out during lunch with my small gang of friends
(source: DeviantArt/arsenixc)

And even though I knew it was an idle daydream, if I actually had gone to live abroad, I think I would still have been deeply shocked by the reality of being a foreigner in Japanese high school. Lack of support for foreign students, the crushing pressure of conformity, and relentless bullying are all real challenges that many students in Japan face. And while not all of these issues might have necessarily happened to me, this perfect ideal of Tokyo high school life in my imagination never really existed.

This was still a lesson I had to learn a decade later, when we finally had a chance to live in Japan. It was a hard but fulfilling path that we navigated to actually seeing Tokyo for what it is, rather than through the distorted lens of my preconceived notions. And once we started to understand and accept the place in truth, that was when we actually started to really fall in love.

It was an endless surprise and delight to understand how much many contradictions and paradoxes existed, an endless cultural knot that we may never fully unentangle in our minds. As Dru shared in our podcast episode Diametrically Opposed:

There are a lot of moments where people start to develop one mental image of Japan and then they just get hit by something that seems so diametrically opposed to that. You get a lot of people going, “Huh?” It builds up an expectation and then knocks it down, much more than other countries I’ve been to.

So let’s not get stopped at the lowest point of our sadness once Paris syndrome strikes. When faced with the rudeness of reality, we should push through to understand the place even more. The parts of Paris and Tokyo that don’t match our expectations aren’t inherently bad. In fact, seeing and understanding it can enable us to more deeply engage with the places themselves. Only then can we start falling in love with the actual city, not just the idea of the city, and become a participant in the real world rather than a passive consumer of a fantasy one.

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