Tokyo

Asscrack of Dawn

The first few peeks out the windown of the bus i took of Tokyo's outskirts were about what i had expected to see-towering high rises housing the throngs of denizens in the world capital of white collar urban indentured servitude. the sky, a pre-dawn smoggy grey. welcome to Tokyo.

after getting to the bus depot at Tokyo station, i waited a few minutes for the station restaraunts to open their gates. my "moruningu setto" of decent coffee and a positively god-awful excuse for a panini sandwich it was like rancid Taco Bell meat mixed with government surplus school cafeteria lunch cheese wrapped in soggy Wonder Bread, a vile enigma wrapped in nostalgia. over that, i pored over my Lonely Planet Japan book and stole glances at the patrons.

for overworked, overrushed white collar slaves, they look pretty leisurely. there's a salaryman taking his sweet time with a tabloid newspaper, another with a comic book. an elderly couple leafing through a guidebook. another businessman has been out cold since i arrived, his arms sprawled out across the table. none of the staff seems to care. he's still asleep when i leave an hour later.

with a walk out to the Imperial Palace, i see still more office workers. one's stopping to stare at the swans in the palace moat (hehehe there's a palace with a moat in the middle of Tokyo, that's so cool!). another worker in a black suit is conducting the iPod Symphony Orchestra as he ambles down the path with his eyes closed. another rather elderly looking one is e-mailing on his cell phone.

these people find some cool ways to handle stress.

Baseless in Harajuku

it's raining. i'm cold and i'm wet. my jeans, the only ones i've brought, are starting to take on a wet dog/stale cigarette smell. i'm sitting in a damn Starbucks of all places, watching the people go by outside the window; there are lots of people out in spite of the rain. most of them are much too fashionable for raincoats. i couldn't find a manga cafe to sleep or shower in. Tanya (the friend i'm staying with) won't get off work until 8, which means i have no place to sleep or shower, sleep or sit until then. and to top it off, i can't get a hold of Yuta to at least keep me company until Tanya gets off work.

hmm. Yuta, a bona fide drunk with his surprisingly low English speaking ability (that's probably much better than he lets on), cheeky smartass charm, simultaneously soft-spoken and intoxo-noxious, reasurring and inaccessible, flaky and calculating, unintelligible and intuitive, loves and loathes himself much like Japan itself. i can't remember at what point he went from an amusing platonic drinking buddy who liked to hit on me nonstop, to a guy i sit and brood over in a Harajuku Starbucks. and i hadn't consciously missed him for most of the summer; it's just when he comes staggering back into my life does all that abscence hit me like standing up from one of those 2-hour shochu benders we'd had in Kagoshima..... cut back to my birthday a week earlier, when he was in Beppu for a visit.

"Tokyo de, ne?" he told me as the drunken haze ascended over our tentative embrace. Tokyo de. he would be with me in Tokyo. the Japanese language has such a way of squeezing so much implication into a few sentences. he's holding back again, just like in Kagoshima after i'd sat on a train that reeked of piss for 5 hours and braved a Meet The Parents (Who Don't Speak Any Fucking English Whatsoever) awkwardness just to visit him. now what in the hell would i do that for? could it be i actually have feelings for the guy who, on our first date, introduced me to people as an "Aeon teacher from Canada" (i'm a GEOS teacher from the States), and got too drunk to speak English. why? who the fuck knows why. probably for the same reason expats stay for years on end in a place that hates them.

but in any case, shit happened like it does and the meeting i had envisioned didn't happen and i was severely disappointed about that. maybe it was just his nonsensical way of avoiding another dramatic goodbye like on the Kagoshima train platform.

ugh. why do i do this to myself? i am free to go anywhere i choose. i came to Japan last June, and i jetted up to one of the biggest, most mythologized cities in the world with my phone and all of my contacts sitting in my bag to go with me--and yet i may as well be in 1955 waiting by the phone for That Guy to call and say "say, let's get some root beer floats in Shibuya. it would be swell!"

well fuck that. i'm going out in the rain, and i'm going to Meiji Jingu shrine.

Meijin Jingu Shrine is sublime in the rain, really. no throngs of tourists to contend with, it's a sacred place with holy water mist wafting from the sky, cleansing me and the sooty city of Tokyo. let it go, you're going to get wet. you're going to get cold. and you're going to get hurt. but pass through the forest and the Torii gates and you will be healed.

My Host's Impending Deportation

i've always wondered about the power of intention and what you really want to happen--do those things have a way of happening according to your true wishes?

Tanya, much as i love her dearly, is a victim of full-on Expat Syndrome. Expat Syndrome is best explained by the following dialogue:

Expat Syndrome-ite: This place is a goddamn joke. the people are idiots, the language is stupid and you can't get any good cheese in this country.
You: okaaayyy.... so uh, how long have you been here?
ES: 5 years.
You: so if this place sucks so much, why don't you leave?
ES: don't be stupid.
You: no seriously, look. you're not married or anything, and you're stuck in a dead-end job. you had the balls to leave your home country in the first place, so why stay here?
ES: ...... (sigh) you just don't get it yet, do you?

indeed, foreign places do have a way of sucking, in more ways than one. they suck time and life force out of certain individuals, and the conscious mind wouldn't have it any other way. they keep people here like gravity, a whirling vortex of cynical xenophobia, a proverbial line of chalk drawn around you in a box shape and a whisper in your head saying "YOU MUST NOT LEAVE THIS BOX"-- maybe that's when the subconscious steps in. maybe that's why Tanya did the seemingly illogical thing that she did....

since you're likely to be completely confused by the musing of the last 2 paragraphs, let me give you some background. my friend Tanya, a graduate of a university here in my adopted city, did what many do after graduating from a Japanese university--go to Tokyo to seek her fortune (or her poverty. whatever). she attained enough fluency in the Japanese language in the past 4 years to secure herself a job with a Tokyo travel agency, work to tide her over until she started her own business. she'd been working illegally since her graduation in March, and her company was in the process of filing for a work visa.

until the day she up and decided she couldn't take it anymore--she had no choice but to quit her job right in the middle of the application process. her company stopped the application, much to her chagrin and that of her friends, her lover, and her potential business partner. Tanya is a smart girl, fluent in 5 languages and blessed with enough savvy (as much as i hate that word, i can't think of a better one) to royally screw her employer over. why then.... WHY would she do something like this? if she had only waited another week, hell probably even a day, she would have had her visa, and she could nor only have quit, but also photocopied her ass and placed it in an advertisement for her agency in Hello Work and there would've been fuck all that her former employer or Immigration could do about it. IF she had waited for ONE MORE DAY. but--

"i couldn't wait anymore. my boss he's.... he's just a bad person and Japanese companies are ridiculous. i couldn't wait anymore."

i didn't judge her verbally. i didn't say what i was thinking, which was "what the hell were you thinking?!" because i knew the truth. she wanted to get out, and this was the only way. deportation. exile.

the only way out of the self-imposed exile of Expat Syndrome is to have your host government impose real exile. become physically removed from the chalk box.

Ueno and the Bitchiest Hippie Ever

i spent my last day in Tokyo a bit drained from Tanya's visa tribulations and giving up on seeing Yuta. i went to Ueno, a place reportedly less fashionable than Shibuya or Harajuku. good. that's more my style. Ueno is not the place for a wild night out in Tokyo, but it looked like that wasn't going to happen for me anyway. so i started looking for a place i might have a quiet drink... when i noticed a small chalkboard advertising the "Space Cake Cafe."

i was intrigued. follow the White Rabbit.

there was a dizzyingly winding staircase leading to a basement bar that was more than a bar. they had postcards from far off locales, Patagonia fleeces for sale, and an aquarium tank full of... paraphenalia. and presumably the goods to go with it.

now, this wasn't exactly a foreign thing to me. in fact, this was something from home that i kinda missed (and when i say "kinda missed," it means i fucking fiend for that shit and curse the US postwar occupation for convincing Japan that an inoccuous, naturally occurring plant is satan in arboreal form). but i knew that this was not Amsterdam, not Phuket, not Vancouver, not Happy Herb's Pizza in Phnom Penh; hell it wasn't even Meadville, Pennsylvania. it was Tokyo and i was a foreigner. and man do they love picking up foreigners for any remote association with drugs around here. plus i was alone. my instinct said to run, but i didn't want to lose face. so i did the only sane and sensible thing i could think of.

i ordered a gin and tonic and sat down.

my first sips were leisurely, read over a very educational French magazine all about cultivating mushrooms. until i could feel the eyes of the barmaid burning into me like microscopic embers. i got the distinct feeling that i was not welcome there, that i was a liability.

i chugged the rest of the gin tonic, paid the lady, and ran back up the spinning staircase into the Ueno night. with paranoia like that, who the hell needs weed anyway?

Tokyo--Final thoughts

after 3 days here, i still don't quite know what to think about it. i certainly didn't have the idealised Lonely Planet experience of Tokyo with the neon lights of Shibuya and the obnoxious Americans in Roppongi. no, i got something different. i got rained on, heart hurt, and a slice of a Same Shit Different Day existence there. and for some odd reason... i can't wait to go back there again to see it on a better day.