Dog Cat Come Here
In which our narrator goes to Japan for the nth time and produces a series of disparate vignettes posing as a cohesive travel story
I’ve been here before, and a lot of it feels the same. For one, the feelings are the same. Or the exhaustion-driven emotions are the same. I am bleary eyed and overly warm and I have this strange sense of hurry, a need to make up for the lost time after basically a whole day has been lost to a flight, to the international date line. That feels samesy, too. Is samesy a word? I’m loopy. But wait, the setting is samesy, too, now that I think about it. I’m standing in a long queue at immigration at Haneda International Airport, in Tokyo.
I was the first off the plane, hoping to avoid exactly this situation, and at first the airport seemed vast and empty. Haneda had been renovated and remodelled since I was last here. It feels far grander and better organized than I remembered. The corridors are now decorated in the high Japanese spartan style, meaning there’s no art, just long clean lines and perfect, functional architecture. Every now and then the nothing-cleanliness is interrupted by a poster for a Big Japanese Brand, a Sony or a Honda, but these too are refined: a picture of a bamboo frond in the morning dew and a single, calligraphed, ornamental character in elegant Kanji. Hope, or Peace, probably.
The border is busy, really busy. I remember this too, but something is different about it now. Japan is in the midst of a huge tourism boom. Last year saw the most-ever tourists to the country (nearly 37 million) and 2025 forecasts suggest this number will be easily surpassed. Its popularity as a destination is in part due to the weakened yen but mostly because people seem to have discovered that Japan is safe, comfortable, and a generally easy place to travel. I’ve been coming here for nearly 20 years and my only warnings to friends and family have been that, compared to the rest of Asia, Japan was expensive (which isn’t really true any more) and that almost no one speaks English, so communicating with locals can be tricky if you don’t try to learn a bit of Japanese. This last point is still true.
For example, and finally an understanding of what all this has been about: the immigration line at Haneda airport. On the TVs mounted above the long queue is what amounts to an advertisement for health insurance, though it takes the form of a cautionary tale. It features a traditional woodcut-style drawing of a geisha and a headline that reads, “There are cases in which medical expenses during a trip to Japan can add up to a high amount.” The ad offers a case study: “Collision with a bicycle resulting in traumatic pneumothorax and fractured ribs” then some figures about the estimated costs of a hospital stay (7.5 million yen, or $75,000ish CAD). There’s a heartwarming line about how if you fail to pay hospital bills you won’t ever be allowed back in.
The second real communication in English is even more spectacular. Each immigration desk has a sheet of A4 paper taped to it with a photoshopped image of a dog, a cat, and a hamburger. The poster also has a little map and the following text (I’ve retained the capitalization as it appeared): “Whoever with DOGs, CATs, and/or MEAT products, TURN LEFT after the baggage claim and GO TO the ANIMAL QUARANTINE.”
After the long line and the weird digital immigration kiosks where you scanned a QR code to be told a letter (A, B, C, or D) that you had to remember but that never comes up again, I got my passport stamped and waited by the baggage carousel for my checked bag, which was directly beside the ANIMAL QUARANTINE. Whoever, I thought. Whoever indeed. One wall behind the ANIMAL QUARANTINE desk was covered with an enormous poster with the same DOG and CAT from the A4 sheet, their places reversed this time. It read, quite simply:
“Not INSPECTED yet? DOG CAT Come here”!
Beside that were replicas in several languages of a poster with various meat products and a cartoon dog in police uniform looking disapproving that you might bring said meat products into Japan. In Vietnamese, the poster was missing the cartoon police dog. Perhaps the Vietnamese are sensitive to animals telling them which meat they can or cannot smuggle into Japan. It took a little while for the bags to come out, during which time neither dog nor cat came there.
In many ways, this is the perfect reintroduction to Japan. It’s a place that feels on one hand officious, rule-driven, repressive, and overbearing, while on the other hand whimsical, ridiculous, slapdash, and hilarious. There’s a proper process for everything, but you’re free to ignore it. On my first trip here, two decades ago, that’s exactly what I did: I ignored it. I don’t remember there having been quarantine rules or English signage or anything like this. I was so new to travel then, so bewildered and charmed by everything, that I faintly or faultily remember what arriving was like. But this was certainly a change. What else had changed in Japan?
Well, Since the Covid-delayed Tokyo 2020* Olympics, Japan has made deliberate steps to make it easier to be a visitor. The English signage, for one. The trains announced the stops in a few different languages. Google Maps worked perfectly. In fact, everything felt more simple this time around, more inviting. This is a curious thing that would make a better/more thoughtful piece: this feels like Japan turning us Japanese in a small way, making us comfortable with a vast affordable public transit system, with complicated machinery to buy our train tickets and our lunches. Forget Japanaphilia, this was Japanification from within. Come to our country, learn our ways, then return home and feel badly when waiting an hour for your bus, pal.
This isn’t that story. This one is entirely selfish in its reflections. This is about the ways in which Japan hasn’t really changed at all, and how helpful that is in showing me how I have.
I spent my first evening in Tokyo retracing old paths, having decided before arriving in Japan that these free days before a photography workshop began would be a nostalgia tour. This was my fifth time in Tokyo, and there were things I had missed dearly: the clear plastic umbrellas for sale at every convenience store; the vending machines; the New York Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt hotel, where Lost in Translation had been surreptitiously filmed, where I had sat talking about Anthony Bourdain on the night he ended his life, and where—a few months later—I finally ended a no-good marriage over three excellent cocktails and some light jazz; Yoshinoya; the little streets around Shinjuku station and their bizarre girly bars with women in anime costumes holding laminated menus, enticing lonely men; the even littler streets in the Golden Gai, that neighbourhood of a hundred preposterously hip microbars in Shinjuku. The Golden Gai would be my first stop.
I had last been here in 2018, at a crisis point. I’d been working in China for a year, getting fat and going slowly insane, and my friend and amateur step contest participant Dave (subscribe to his excellent Substack) staged a kind of intervention, demanding I join him in Korea—where we had both taught English a decade earlier—and Japan. I was festering in Hangzhou, on the brink of quitting my terrible, pointless job, so I heartily accepted his invitation/demand. The change of scenery offered a perfect reset, and gave me the courage and resolve to return to China a couple of weeks later to see out my contract and do my damndest to enjoy myself in the strangest of places. Those stories have yet to darken this newsletter, but they will in time.
So I went to meet Dave in Korea, where we spent a few days on our own nostalgia tour around Seoul and Suwon. We ate well, visited the video game market and the goblin market, popped into the palace, strolled around Hongdae and Insadong, walked the Lesser Wall of Suwon, got drunk on soju and Hite, then headed to Japan. We landed in Tokyo with a mission to try as many new whiskies as possible. (Dave had brought a whisky magazine with him on the trip and on the short flight from Seoul to Tokyo we wrote a list of 25 we hoped to find over 10 days in Japan. By the end of the first day, we’d tried 12. Most of these in the bar we stopped at in the Golden Gai.)
The Golden Gai is six tiny laneways squeezed between a municipal office and a shrine at the dodgy edge of Shinjuku. In some way, it represents pre-war Tokyo, pre-fire bombs. It’s all cramped two-story buildings designed for tiny pre-war people. Through some trick of fate, or time, or general entropy, nearly all of the buildings have become bars and restaurants, into which a maximum of eight people can fit—very snuggly. It’s a tiny neighbourhood, so it was easy to find the bar I’d loved six years earlier, right on the corner of the third street beside an American-themed bar that flew a huge American flag and had that picture of the “Only you” guy on the front. I walked past the bar a couple of times, happily idling in the afternoon light, snapping photos. There was an older white guy inside, yapping loudly at the young bartender, who looked bored and a little distraught. I did a few laps of the neighbourhood, hoping he’d tire himself out and leave. On the fourth pass, with him still windbagging, I gave up and went in anyway.
It’s an incredible, tiny place. It whole place is probably only 10 feet wide and has room for six people around the U-shaped bar. It improbably has stairs to a second floor, but you’d have to squat down to climb the stairs. The bartender—who I remembered from the previous visit—is a petite punk Japanese woman, tattooed and distant but polite when called upon. The man, a 62-year-old Swede (one of many details he insisted on repeating), was chatting at her non-stop in rapid, peculiarly accented English that she barely understood, not so much asking questions as streaming his consciousness at her. I folded myself into the bar across from him, the space so small that my back was pressed against the wall and I could feel the bass from the place next-door tickling my spine, and the man’s focus shifted from her to me.
Where was I from? Did they speak real French in Montreal? Can you even swim in the Saint Lawrence River? Sweden was perfect, but too cold. It was his first time in Japan, and it was so cheap and so clean. What did Canadians say when they rented a car, “hire” or “rent”? Why was our English so bad? He was going to Thailand next. He’d been there 15 times, almost always to Pattaya. He had a friend there. Was there even anything in Saskatchewan? Then what was the point of Saskatchewan? Why were there so many homeless people in Vancouver, in Las Vegas? Did this bar have non-alcoholic beer? No? Fine, he’d have an alcoholic beer.
At some point during this monologue, a Japanese couple entered the bar, dripping with sweat and carrying two large suitcases that took up all of the remaining space. His focus shifted to them—Were they actually Japanese? What language did they speak? Where were they from? Where was that? What was the point of it? Had they heard about Saskatchewan?—and I had a brief moment of peace to soak up the glorious bar. I ordered my favourite Japanese summer drink (an umeshu soda) and finished my excellent book and thought about how time changes things, often very little. Here was this bar, totally unbothered by the pandemic and the passing of years, surviving on a few chatty patrons per day. The Japanese couple finished their highballs and left, and the man turned back to me, suddenly solemn.
“I didn’t start to travel until I was old,” he began. “What a waste. I learned too late that travel teaches you things you didn’t already know. I learned you only really know yourself when you see something new that you don’t understand. Now I know I’ve got to keep learning. And travelling. What else is there?”
Without knowing, we read from the same travel scriptures. He was paraphrasing to me a line from Matthew Arnold that had inspired me to start travelling decades earlier. I raised my drink to him, gladly. I had judged him on his brashness, but that was foolish. It was sheer curiosity, a thing to be praised and cherished. At his last, he energized me. I paid my bill and slid out into the sticky Tokyo evening, gorgeously tinted with neon lights, and wandered old roads happily with my camera, trying to see something I’d seen before with slightly different eyes.
Japan has wrongly earned a reputation as a technologically advanced nation. It produces the world’s best cameras and most of its TVs, it used to make a pretty mean VCR, and it has churned out every video game system since the advent of video games, which were advented here. Its cartoons have always portrayed futuristic visions of technopolises where spaceships land on the tops of skyscrapers and robot boys fly around by shooting flames out of their boots. These futuristic visions never quite materialized, though. There are elevated trains in some cities that glow in the night, but that’s about it.
It’s pleasantly low-tech, in fact. Cash is still widely used, even in 2025. Smart phones are a new thing. (It was only during the pandemic that they took over market share; before 2020, more than half of phone users in Japan preferred flip phones. The ones with Snake.) The subways and trains use paper tickets that you buy from a clunky old machine under a big map with all the stations shown along with the price of the ticket to get from where you are standing to any place on the map. You press a button corresponding to a price (not a place) and then throw some coins into a little slot and it makes nice mechanical sounds while it chucks out your change and prints your ticket. The subway gates are mechanical in the same way, loud and chonking and manual. It’s like a futuristic vision of the 70s imagined by someone in the 50s, and like many things here it hasn’t changed much over the last half century.
This stasis is helpful for me, because it makes it easy to benchmark how time has changed me. It’s been nearly 20 years since I first came to Japan, almost half a lifetime. I keep thinking of the lines my parents used to draw on a door frame to measure mine and my brother and sister’s heights each year, the different colours of pen with our names scrawled beside a date. There are lines like that around Japan for me.
Here’s one. It takes place in Osaka:
I first visited Osaka in the summer of 2007 to get my work permit for Korea. I had been working under the table for months at a dodgy English academy in Ulsan, waiting for my diploma to arrive from Canada so I could submit the paperwork to be a legal employee but not with any real urgency since being an illegal employee was exactly the same except I got paid in cash. The owner of the English school was a creep who hired me the first second he saw me. I was standing outside of his school on a December morning, trying to get cash from an ATM, and he was smoking a nasty cigarette by the front door. He asked where I was from as a way of saying hello and when I said Canada he said, as though it was the natural reply, “You want to work for me?” I said sure. I had been in Korea for 36 hours. He brought me on quickly and I taught preschoolers how to ask to go to the bathroom. Sometimes, inspectors would visit the school I worked at and he would tell me to go home. One time, I hid in the bathroom for half an hour until they left. Okay, so there were a few ways in which being a legal employee was different.
After a few months of this teach-and-hide routine, all of my paperwork was ready and I had to leave Korea to get a visa printed in my passport. The cheapest flight to a city with an embassy was to Osaka. So I went to Osaka for a few days.
I was 25 years old and had no plan. In life, obviously (I had accepted a job from a stranger), but more relevantly, I had no plan in Osaka. I booked a mixed-dorm hostel and took the wrong train several times from Kansai Airport. It took me a whole day to get there. I had curry by a train station, thick and sweet and filled with the kind of veggies you find in a frozen mixed bag. I was carrying an enormous backpack because I wasn’t sure I’d be granted the visa and allowed to go back to Korea. I took a wrong train and I found myself near Osaka Castle and walked around with the burdensome bag for hours, sweating through my clothes. I eventually made it to the hostel, tired and happy. I spent the days going to the embassy and wandering aimlessly. I met another teacher and we became friends. I took a solo trip to Nara and was followed around by 200 hungry deer, then sat alone at the top of a hill overlooking the largest Buddhist shrine in the world—which had been deliberately spared by the US firebombing campaign due to its beauty, which purportedly moved the homicidal crackpot General McArthur to tears—listening to the Shins on my first-generation iPod nano. I left like me for the first time in years.
Beside that line on the door frame representing Osaka are my trips to Tokyo: the figures by the tracks in the rain, the night Bourdain died, the divorce date, and now this one. And beside those are my other Japan trips: the fat couple by the graves, the mushroom cloud memorial of Nagasaki. The dates are written in funny colours of ink, in different handwriting, and they show me growing and shrinking and then growing again.
Tokyo, 2025, then. This is a trip arranged entirely around education and hero worship. I’ve registered for a photography workshop in which I follow Steve McCurry around Tokyo, more or less. Or rather, in which I meet up at various locations around Tokyo with Steve McCurry and another amazing photographer, Eolo Perfido, and 15 other participants, and then we immediately scatter and walk alone through busy neighbourhoods, trying to create something magical.
This isn’t the story of the workshop either. For now I mention it because it served to move me around a city I thought I knew well, forcing me back to neighbourhoods I had seen years ago. More lines on doorways, more reminders of life coming and going. It took me to unknown places too. It first nudged then dragged me out of my comfort zone as a photographer. I spent the week feeling dizzied by new information, new skills, new friends. It was intoxicating and lovely and therefore deserves its own reflections, which I’ll write about soon. Until then:
I had a couple of full days before the workshop started to adjust to time zones, eat as many onigiri as I could from 7/11 (far superior to any other convenience store onigiri), and go to places not listed on the programme for the week. In theory, that was the plan. In practice, I mostly walked the same route from my strange little hotel north of Shinjuku every morning, finding coffee and jogging lazily through a tiny hilly park before being caught in monsoon rain and sprinting back to the hotel to dry off. I revelled in the sensation of travelling solo: no real schedule, good music playing in my nerdy running headphones, nowhere to be at any given moment and no itinerary beyond what appealed to me most that day: taking photos in the Golden Gai, sampling whiskies, slamming ramen, whatever/anything/all of it. I napped and wrote and smoked shisha and walked and bought notebooks and pens from my favourite stationery store and looked at second-hand camera gear and tried on clothes and went back for seconds of the ramen and the sake. I stayed awake until 10 pm and felt proud of this fact, then had an emergency late-night onigiri from 7/11 and went to sleep.
I checked some favourite foods off of my list and booked two fancy omakase meals from the Michelin guide to Tokyo. I did a sake tasting. This is worth describing.
I had arranged a sake tasting through Airbnb Experiences and planned to take it on the first full day I was in Tokyo. That morning, I got a message from the hosts asking me if I wanted to cancel, as I was the only one enrolled in that day’s session. I loved this, and insisted that we keep the appointment. I was thrilled by the idea of a one-on-one session with an expert, but when I arrived and found there was an American couple who had signed up at the last minute. They looked like any two people I see every day on work calls, young and attractive and rich from a career spent working in tech. They were from San Diego but lived in the Bay Area. It was their first time in Japan. They had two kids. They fancied themselves wine experts, though she winkingly admitted to being something of a tequila expert as well. They were shy at first, but quickly came out of their shells at the hands of our hilarious Japanophile sake teacher, Max.
Max was a former missionary from Colorado and was only in his mid-20s, but was on his second life. He had been obsessed with Japan from a young age and started learning Japanese when he was 11 so he could watch the cartoons and read the comics. When he was 19, he came to Japan on mission and quickly strayed, in his words, to a life of drinking and debauchery. He wore a cross on a chain around his neck and was awkward and earnest. He mad bad jokes while he told us everything he knew about sake, which was everything. He explained things calmly and clearly between his jokes, and critically, he poured enormous glasses of 8 sakes and we all got half in the bag. Maybe more than half.
Sake is underrated as a drink, I think, in part because it falls outside of the beer-wine-spirit categorization. It’s usually clear, so it looks like a spirit, but it’s lighter in alcohol and closer to wine in terms of alcohol-by-volume. But it’s brewed like beer and made of rice. Within Japan, obviously, it’s well-understood and often revered. It’s available almost everywhere that food is. Outside of Japan, it’s available served hot at most shitty sushi restaurants, and while warm sake is a real thing in Japan as well, it’s often offered at room temperature or even slightly chilled. There are hundreds of variations of the drink, from cloudy, unpasteurized, and pure sakes to ones that look and smell chemical, like soju, and which have had grain alcohol added after brewing to increase the punch.
Max explained all of this while sharing some of his favourites, asking us to rate each one (and all of the paired snacks) on some paper while he told us stories of his time in Japan. Ever loving a ranking, I took to this task with joy, but the Americans hesitated. Max, the enthusiastic kindergarten teacher, asked us each what we scored the sakes. The man from San Diego crossed his arms briefly, then looked away and sort of sighed. “I don’t rank things,” he explained. “I’m just at a stage of my life now where I’m beyond ranking.” Max smiled and nodded and I said, “Sure, sure” as though he had said the most natural thing in the world and not casually dismissed the concept of liking some things more than other things, or ordering the world around him in some logical way. We looked searchingly at his wife. “I give that one a nine,” she said, and normal life resumed.
By the time we had started the eighth glass of sake, the couple had completely lowered their guard. They began showing me wine tasting videos they made at home with their two adorable kids pretending to describe and then drink the wine. I was a bit sad for the afternoon to come to an end, because I was having one of those rare and comforting moments as a solo traveller: I wanted to spend more time with people I had just met. We had a rapport going, and I liked their nerdy awkwardness and they seemed to like mine. They had a food tour to get to and I had an omakase booked, but I think if any of us had suggested going for another drink somewhere, those previously made plans would have evaporated.
As I get older, my threshold for enjoying these random encounters gets ever-lower. In my earlier life as a traveller, I had been puritanical about talking to or befriending strangers. I even had a rule about it.
Back to Osaka, younger me.
In those days I believed that solo travel demanded and was only informed by loneliness. I liked spending my days alone, walking aimlessly and endlessly, snapping photos and writing down my thoughts in a worn orange notebook. As a social person, I also liked small talk with other travellers, but I believed—genuinely believed—that I needed to meet the same person three times before we could become friends. Once was random, twice was a coincidence, but three times was kismet.
On that visa-run trip to Osaka, my self-imposed rule of threes was tested and then validated by a Canadian named Ryan, who was warm and funny and curious and sitting in the same waiting room of the Korean consulate on the same kind of visa run that I was on. He lived in Gyeongju—not far from where I was living in Ulsan—and had the same story as me, basically: he had shown up on a whim to visit a friend and been offered a job, where he had been working under the table for months while waiting for his paperwork to be approved. We had a friendly chat and then went to the service windows to submit our passports for processing, and when I was done he was still at his window, and that was that. I left to go eat breakfast.
Twenty-four hours later, when I went to collect my passport, he was there again. Again we chatted and exchanged tips and stories and made dumb jokes as though we were old friends, and this time when we were done at the consulate we went outside together. He invited me with him to Osaka Castle, but I had been already and politely declined. We exchanged email addresses (it was 2007, okay?). He went off to the castle and I went to get lost in the underground city. If I ever saw him again, I told myself, we could be friends.
This trip was pre-smartphone and Google Maps, and I always enjoyed testing my sense of direction in new places by taking random turns on random streets and trusting I’d find my way back to wherever I was staying. With no set schedule, I took great joy in creating a maze out of the walkways and food courts and kiosks beneath downtown Osaka, a network of subway stations and pedestrian tunnels with confusing signage and arrows pointing to landmarks I had never heard of. I walked for hours underground, truly lost. I stopped for bad coffees and ramen and read my book and fired up the ol’ iPod nano and listened to Iron and Wine probably, and eventually decided I was ready to surface and figure out how to get back to my hostel. I didn’t recognize the names of any of the exits in the underground city, and chose a staircase at random and ascended to the street level. It was early afternoon, and the bright sun surprised me after hours in the fluorescent underground. I squinted and fished around in my bag for my sunglasses.
“Drew!” shouted a happy, familiar voice. “Drew! What the hell?!”
It was Ryan, returning from the castle. I had no idea where he was staying and didn’t know where I was. He laughed at my confused look, then gave me a giant hug. “How weird!” he yelled. “Want a beer?”
What followed was one of my most fun and memorable days of travel. Those beers came from a convenience store, and we drank them in a tiny city park, marvelling at the coincidence of our third collision. We walked through the incredible plastic food model manufacturing districts with their lifelike versions of every meal available in Japan and then through the even-more-incredible old electronics districts with their endless video games and stacks of scat porn and old laser discs of Free Willy 2. We met a group of high-school students training for soccer by running up and down an enormous staircase and challenged them to a race that Ryan won and I lost happily, collapsed in laughter halfway up the stairs after being pushed playfully to the ground by one of the Japanese boys who shouted what I assumed were obscenities at me. We had curry katsu for dinner and sang karaoke poorly and we ended the night in an Irish bar, and life just felt so easy, so smooth.
This was the reason for the rule of threes, I rationalized. It would filter out the people not worth spending quality time with and the best ones would reveal themselves.
I now know that this is total nonsense, of course. I now know that the odds of meeting someone even once when travelling are astronomical, and that those moments should be treasured and cherished. But I was in my 20s and thought everything needed a heightened, special meaning, in order for it to mean anything.
It doesn’t. Sometimes you can meet people and think, simply, “They seem like the good kind of people. It would be nice to keep having fun with them until we can’t any more.” As the sake tasting wound down, I thought about asking the Californian couple if they wanted to join me for dinner. They mentioned in passing that they were about to start a food tour, so the connection was severed, but we had a nice goodbye the afternoon rain and I went back to my hotel to change for dinner.
As I worked my way across the city to my first-ever omakase in Japan—a delicious sushi tasting menu with sake pairings and only two other guests, neither of whom spoke until the end of the meal—I felt warmed and at ease. This was in part down to the new ease that Japan was radiating. Things were so straightforward and the quality of everything so high that it was difficult to feel any other way. But there was something changing in me too, or at least a new and sudden awareness of some previous change that had been slow to reveal itself.
I felt the old travel rules softening, if not falling away entirely. I was starting to learn the lessons that the photography workshop would reinforce all week: move slowly, be patient, wait for the right moments, because they will always come.
***
Read my three previous stories about Japan, all from the Faulty Memory Series:
Adrift In The World's Biggest City: Faulty Memory Japan, Part One
Lessons not learned from Mario Kart, or its unlicensed real-world equivalent, MariCar.
Graveyards And Heated Floors: Faulty Memory Japan, Part Two
Japan is a country of islands. Look it up. I did.
