Each of the individual identities have a series of bragging rights, the newer often about how wonderfully incoherent Japan can be through to the long stay "do you remember what it was like in the old days?". And the old days were interesting, a life without Facebook, Instagram or, more importantly as it were, internet of any kind. These days if you invite someone to an event they can just follow their phones, back in the day for us it was a wing and a prayer. A map, via a fax machine (if you had one) would be the saving grace, which would then need converting to an address on the ground (and a significant amount of aimless wondering as addresses are not that straightforward); often resulting in strays and orphans. And yes, we'd take them in if they were really lost.
And then there's the "how did you first arrive". Only recently before I'd flown to the Land of the Rising Sun for the first time (in late 1991) had Russia opened it's airspace. I flew direct but not too long before that I'd have had the choice; freeze overnight in Anchorage, or develop a hangover in Hong Kong. A decade earlier had been so sensitive the Russians shot down a passenger liner (Korean Air 007) after it strayed off course and over Soviet territory (actually leading to the civilian release of Global Positioning Satellite to avoid such tragedies ever occurring again). But as we were swapping stories we found another group smiling like Cheshire Cats. They'd arrived when Narita was still a rice field.If we had postcards and fax machines back then, I wonder what it'll be like thirty years from now...
