Before we ever set foot in Linz, we had already exchanged dozens of emails with the people at Hp23, our editorial base for Ars Electronica. What struck me wasn't the content. It was the tone.
Booking a venue abroad, in a language none of us speak fluently, for a project that's hard to explain even in Japanese, usually comes with friction.
What came back instead was a reply that opened by apologizing for a week away, and closed with an offer to walk through the building with a handheld camera the next day, just so we could see the space properly. Even without a finished plan, there was a real willingness to figure things out together.
I assumed it was just good luck. A helpful person on a good day.
Then I started digging, and learned that Linz and Japan have been connected for longer than any of us on this team have been alive. In the late nineteenth century, a Meiji-era diplomat named Aoki Shuzo was involved in Japan's diplomacy with Austria-Hungary.
That alone would be a footnote. What makes it matter is what came after.
Aoki's descendant, Count Niklas Salm-Reifferscheidt, lives near Linz. His visit to Japan eventually led Nasushiobara City, in Tochigi Prefecture, to sign a sister-city agreement with Linz in 2016. Since then, students have traveled between the two cities almost every year, and in 2025, choirs from both performed together at the Osaka-Kansai Expo. Not a plaque on a wall. A relationship that keeps getting renewed.
I want to be precise here, because it matters. The person who answered our emails at Hp23 has no known connection to this story. It isn't that the person who was kind to us happens to be the count's descendant. That would be too neat, and it isn't true.
What I think might actually be true is smaller.
A city that has spent over a hundred years occasionally, unpredictably, welcoming someone from Japan might carry something of that in how it responds when Japan shows up again. Not because any one person remembers Aoki Shuzo. Almost certainly, they don't. But a place accumulates its own quiet habits, the way people do.
I can't prove that's why an email about camera angles and courtyard access came back so warm. I don't think it's provable. But I don't think it's nothing, either.
In September, six of us will walk through a city none of us have lived in. For us, it's the first time.
But even if we don't know this city, the city might already carry the memory of someone who came before us.
We might not be arriving in Linz for the first time. We might just be arriving again.
