The Faulty Memory Series Japan, Part One: Tokyo
The Faulty Memory Series Japan, Part One: Tokyo
Lessons not learned from Mario Kart, or its unlicensed real-world equivalent, MariCar.
So, Tokyo then.
It’s December. It’s mid-afternoon and cloudy. What strength the sun had is already fading for the day. I’ve traded Ottawa’s snow for Tokyo’s half-hearted rain. More of an intermittent mist, really. The hostel I have booked is not quite downtown, but Tokyo is enormous and Narita Airport is nowhere near it. I have a train ticket booked, a gift from my friend Erin who I’m off to meet in a little over 24 hours. The train ticket and the hostel booking are the only things concrete, graspable. Everything else is impossible to understand.
For example: I did not know before arriving, as it was never made explicit in Mario Kart, that Japan is a left-hand drive country. As a consequence of its being a left-hand drive country, it’s a left-hand everything country. Escalators, travellators, staircases, sidewalks—they were all the wrong way around for me. Add to that the fact that I had learned zero words of Japanese, and I immediately realized I was in over my head. I couldn’t stop smiling.
There is no purer high than arriving in a new country for the first time. I thrive on the sense of bewilderment, the disillusions, the sudden clumsiness, the red-eyed, tired-brained decision-making process that somehow puts you on the correct train platform after a long-haul flight, waiting with your mountain of luggage to enter a new place. I still feel this way when arriving in a new country, nearly two decades after this first trip. I even feel this way when entering some places I’ve been countless times: Istanbul, Bangkok, Barcelona. If I ever stop feeling that way, I ask to be put out to pasture, or at least to be taken behind the shed and shot.
Beyond the first impression that Japan has accidentally put everything on the wrong side of the road, the overwhelming sense was of rigid, uptight orderliness. Every few feet on the train platforms, spaces were neatly labelled to indicate where commuters should stand, at which precise spot they would enter the train, and how far apart from each other these tasks should be performed. (This in the way-before-COVID era, no less.) Having never been the type to follow instructions written on floors or to take orders from stickers, I milled about the well-heeled, well-suited multitude on the platform, yawning and sweating, beaming and mystified.
The train pulled in at the precise second it was meant to and the Japanese Railway Ballet began. The train doors opened, a stream of identically dressed people shuffled orderly out, and two streams of different identical dressed people shuffled aboard. The only missteps in this perfect dance were performed by a bearded Canadian who didn’t know the choreography and dragged his giant bags aboard in a cloud of profanity. The train pulled away at the precise second it was meant to, and I slumped victoriously into an open seat, bags jammed as neatly as I could manage into a corner beside me.
Looking back, it’s easy to think that the next thing I did was pull my phone out of my pocket and check where I was going for the 12th time. Then I probably sent a few messages to friends and family, a few silly jokes and some pictures of some bizarre thing I’d seen in the airport, like a hot dog restaurant called AirDog or an adult dressed as a Pokemon handing out spa coupons. But this was 2006. I didn’t have a phone. I had a bright orange notebook with a few printed pages folded into the middle. I had a pen. I held both, not writing anything, but staring out the foggy window as Tokyo first began to reveal itself.
Are there jagged hills and endless, soggy rice paddies between Narita Airport and central Tokyo? There must be. There must be all manner of Oriental iconography along this path: the sweeping karst vistas under a full moon, the villagers hustling against nightfall and a strong wind that is determined to make quick work of the stacks of rice paper they carry over the old wooden bridge, everyone rushing home because of the distant ringing of the ceremonial gong. So wilful was my determination to be, at long last and for the first time, in Asia, that this is what I pictured then. It’s what I still picture now, looking back. Some visions are impossible to shake. But the truth is far more mundane and mystical in an everyday way that screams, “This is a new place and you don’t get to understand it!”
No, of course the approach to Tokyo isn’t an ancient Chinese painting or a Hokusai woodcut. It’s a quick sprint through drab Yokohama and then a smattering of suburbs glimpsed only briefly, at the infinite railway crosses that make up all Japanese cities. It was these, the railway crossings, that captivated me. Every 30 seconds, the train—and with it, my quickening entry into the world of international travel—bisected a thousand average lives just being blandly led. People waited in plastic raincoats atop bicycles, or huddled beneath clear umbrellas, their white shirts and plain ties and bored faces illuminated by the flashing red lights of the crossing signals. Through the misted window, they were woken spirits, some misshapen approximation of an office worker summoned to existence by Miyazaki’s paintbrush. Behind them, the streets were lit only by the glow of Japan’s ubiquitous vending machines, offering hot and cold beverages for a hundred yen, always casting that pale white light into any darkened spaces needing a reminder of civilization’s continued existence.
So transfixed was I with the passing landscape that I failed to notice a woman sidle up and sit in the seat opposite me. This was a significant feat of ignorance, given the intensity with which she was attempting to make eye contact. She must have been in her late 40s, short and slim, dressed tidily and with her hair pulled into a neat, high ponytail. She probably wore a simple pantsuit and low heels, the uniform of all Japanese office-working women. The only thing remarkably un-Japanese about her was her determination to meet my eye. This now accomplished, she bowed and smiled in that perfect efficient way the Japanese have mastered, and then signaled with a subtle nod to the empty seat beside me. In fact, the whole bench beside me was empty, but I assume she meant the seat directly beside mine. I gestured far less subtly, a huge sweeping arm movement meant to indicate the seat’s general availability, and she burst into that uncomfortable giggle the Japanese have also mastered, ashamed at how blunt my offer to share a bench had been. Still, she accepted, and sat directly beside me, looking straight ahead instead of at me. It was thus that she spoke her first words to me:
“American?”
This was followed by more polite giggling, another apologetic bow.
“No, I’m Canadian. My name is Drew. Nice to meet you.” I followed this with a broad smile aimed at the side of her head.
“Hi,” she said. Or maybe, “Hai.” Both were appropriate responses. Another respectful bow. “I practice English with you.” This was not posed as a question. It was simply her stating what was about to happen.
The next 15 minutes passed very slowly. Our conversation covered such topics as meeting, it being nice to meet, the niceness of meeting, and how nice it was to, in fact, meet. Eventually, after passing through the fertile lands of Where Are You From and Do You Have a Family, we landed on an important topic: where will you go in Tokyo? I tried to explain by showing the name of the hostel, first in English (met with a blank stare, a head cocked slightly to the side, a sharp inhaling of breath) and then remembered I’d printed out the address in Japanese as well. This was met with exclamations of joy. There was, I think it transpired, a kind of good restaurant near my hostel. My language-exchange buddy, with sudden confidence, grabbed my notebook from my hands, took my pen, flipped to a random empty page and drew a map. In one corner she put a star indicating my hostel, and in the opposite corner she drew a bowl with an expertly drawn tempura shrimp sticking out the top. She tapped the shrimp bowl repeatedly with the end of my pen, saying, “Go here.” I said, “Sure.” She smiled, looked around the train carriage, then stood up and waved goodbye. I saw her walk a few seats away and sit back down. I could only see the back of her head, but read upon it a sense of pride, or at the very least weary satisfaction.
The notebook with the map and the drawing of the shrimp stayed with me years afterward, all my scribbled notes and diaries forced to navigate around that artefact of the first stranger who was kind enough to chat.
I have very limited experience with hostels. Most of my adult life has been spent travelling with partners, and even in the early, cheaper stages of travel, two people sharing the cost of a bad hotel always seemed preferable to sleeping in bunk beds in a room full of strangers. Prior to my trip to Japan, I had spent a few nights in hostels while driving across Canada with two friends, but those hostels were on the backstreets of smaller Canadian cities, and the three of us almost always had them entirely to ourselves.
I stayed in hotels on my first two solo trips, both of which were to Japan. Therefore, more than half of my experience with the hostel world has occurred in Japanese cities. By some transitive property or another, I believe this makes me an expert in Japanese hostels. My finding, as a Japanese hostel expert, is this:
Hostels in Japan are incredible.
They are mystifying and humiliating, ruthlessly clean, and like hostels (presumably) the world over, full of quirky weirdos: the loud Irish guys, drunk at dawn; the quiet, mousy American women smelling of patchouli; the shifty-eyed Russians in too-tight jeans, hands stuffed impossibly into tiny pockets; the snoring German. And in the case of my first hostel in Tokyo, the tall, handsome, energic Greek: Kostas.
Kostas was standing by the door of the hostel as I arrived, the 15-minute walk from the train station over pedestrian bridges and up colourful alleys having left me drenched with sweat, with aching arms and an unremovable smile. He laughed a little and smiled broadly, then without asking grabbed one of my bags and headed inside. I followed him up a narrow staircase to the second-floor, where a scowling middle-aged Japanese man took my passport and checked me in. “How many nights are you here?” This was Kostas. “I’m Kostas,” he added.
We shook hands, and he seemed crestfallen that I was only there for one night. “Then we have to go get a drink right now,” he said. He carried my bags up another flight of stairs and threw them onto a top bunk, then lead me back down the stairs to the street.
Everyone in Canada told me that I would get mugged every day on every trip I would ever take, and to always hide my valuables from view at all times when out and about. This seemed sage advice to someone who had never been anywhere, and so I wore—on the flight, on the train, and even now—a slim fanny pack that could tuck into my pants that contained a bit of yen and my passport and bank cards. I had been wearing it for more than 30 hours. It was chafing the skin on my stomach from walking. It was soaked with sweat. It was vile. I remember wearing a pair of baggy jeans very much en vogue in 2006, and based on file photos of the era was probably sporting some kind of graphic T-shirt under a ragged blazer I’d bought at a thrift shop for no more than five dollars. So attired, reeking fanny pack well-concealed on my person, I took my first steps into the Tokyo nightlife.
Kostas proved incredible company, the exact ideal of a one-day travel companion. He was fearless, spoke to everyone, always with that big grin plastered on his face. Our first stop was a bar run by the hostel, catering to foreigners with a Western idea of Japan. The cocktails had names like The Last Samurai and Land of the Rising Sun. Our second, third, and possibly fourth stops remain a mystery to me. I hadn’t slept and had barely eaten, and the Rising Suns hit hard. We walked, drank, compared notes on our concept of what Japan was supposed to feel like (X, Y, Z) versus what it did feel like (X, Y, Z, maybe A). We never did find that ramen restaurant with the tempura shrimp.
When I finally collapsed in my top bunk, slept came instantly. If this was travel, I was already hooked.
I learned three important lessons on this first day, all of which I still follow to this day. The first three commandments in Drew’s Travel Bible, or Drew’s Travel Exodus and/or Deuteronomy. Having now committed to this whole biblical bit, those lessons are as follows:
1. Thou shalt always speak to everyone.
2. Thou shalt always say yes to offers made kindly.
3. Thou shalt always stay up until it is your normal bedtime, no matter how tired you are and how badly you want to sleep, in order to defeat jet lag.
This third commandment is the hardest to follow, but it’s a trick that works so please try it. It will leave you more able to succeed at the first and second commandments, which are more important.
The majority of people you meet while travelling are not trying to rip you off, or murder you, and the signs for these intentions are often easy to read. As an absolute rule, no one in Japan is trying to rip you off or murder you. In other countries, this may be more likely, but the odds are still long. (Parenthetically, I’ll later tell a story that proves that rules one and two should not be followed in all situations, but that exception only applies in Vietnam.) The risk of not talking to everyone who wants to talk to you, of not saying yes to the friendly but bizarre stranger on the train, to the smiling Greek, is a life led in frightened isolation, one in which you eat every meal in Tokyo at a Wendy’s or McDonald’s. Saying no means you’ll never spend a night laughing uncontrollably while drinking beer out of vending machines. Saying no means you’ll never learn what’s behind the door with the low-hanging curtains and the barrels of sake in the alley behind the train station. And what kind of life is that, not knowing what’s behind the door?
