The hole punch clicked as it pierced the thin plastic of my residence card. “Sabishii desu ne,” said the immigration officer at Haneda Airport as she voided my residency—we’ll miss you. It was only a small hole, barely 6 mm across, but it might as well have been straight through the heart.

There was something absurd about it: an administrative procedure carrying the emotional weight of an ending. I moved through boarding half a step outside myself. As the evening flight lifted into the dark, I looked down at the nightscape once more, and it dawned on me—though I had decided to leave, I was more attached to Tokyo than I had realised.

Growing attached to, and later missing, a person is easy enough to recognise. We can also name, with some clarity, the absence of certain sensations: tastes, sounds, the feel of air against the skin. Routines, too, become objects of longing. Inevitably, whole periods of time recede into eras, taking with them earlier versions of ourselves, whose loss we occasionally mourn. Missing a place, though, collects all of this at once—person, sensation, routine, self—giving the feeling its particular astringency and complexity.

In the Japanese Journal of Environmental Psychology, Hana Oya draws a useful distinction. In ordinary language, attachment describes being drawn by affection and finding it difficult to part. In psychology, it refers to emotional bonds, typically between people. Environmental psychology extends that bond to place. When the object of attachment is not a person but an environment, it becomes what scholars call place attachment. Its loss can unsettle the self.¹

Drawing on earlier research, Oya notes that attachment is not singular but layered. In a study of residents in a long-inhabited mountain village, geographer Graham Rowles identified what he called “insideness”—a condition of being woven into a place over time. It appears in three dimensions:

Social insideness: emotional bonds within close-range spaces and deep interpersonal familiarity.

Autobiographical insideness: the accumulation of life narratives anchored to place.

Physical insideness: familiarity with spatial arrangements through long-term use.

It is the physical dimension that, for me, gathers the others. Streets learned by repetition become the backdrop to friendship; familiar rooms hold the sediment of conversation. Social bonds and autobiographical memory reside in parks, along river paths, at café tables and station concourses. Over time, the built environment becomes a kind of emotional infrastructure, not because it was designed to be, but because it has absorbed so many personal histories.

Yet it does so without sentiment. And that indifference is part of what makes departure ache. You may experience leaving as a break-up, but the city does not register the loss. It continues—lit, loud, vast—entirely without you. The attachment runs in one direction only; it is never reciprocal.

A current meme captures this asymmetry in relation to Tokyo. “Nobody talks about coming home from this,” it reads, set over images of the metropolis, “to this,” followed by deliberately drab scenes of an unnamed home city. I recognise the loss, but I resist making a casualty of the unnamed city. Loving one place need not entail disappointment in another. Romance need not curdle into disdain.

Tokyo may be extraordinary, but the point is not to live indefinitely in the afterglow of somewhere else. The city in front of you warrants its own attention. Urban maturity may lie in resisting the impulse to rank places and instead allowing them to accumulate, each developing a different aspect of your character, each altering the angle from which you see the world, much like the people we encounter over time.

The immigration hole punch was an extreme case, and likely the first time I had consciously registered my own place attachment. More often, the twinge arrives in smaller doses—pulling out of Gare du Nord on the Eurostar after a weekend in Paris; waiting in departures at Copenhagen Airport, perhaps. Yet at a meta-emotional level, I find myself grateful for it. The ache is proof of having inhabited somewhere fully. It is, in its way, the best souvenir.

When I gave up Tokyo, I received London in return. A TikTokian sensibility might narrate that exchange as loss: the British capital reduced to grey pavements set against Tokyo at its most electric. I prefer a different framing: to survey what is singular to each city, and what each does that nowhere else does in quite the same way.

In the colder months, London feels like settling into a worn leather armchair by the fire, a book open. Its looser, more restless energies incubate through winter and surface in spring. By summer, the city is unbuttoned, experimental, alive at the edges. There is nowhere I would rather be until I must be elsewhere.

Perhaps that is the remedy: to hold space for all the cities in your life. Places that have claimed your attachment in different ways, at different times. We imagine we are passing through them. More often, they are passing through us.

※ AJ

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References

¹ The Affective Bond Between an Individual and a Place