Notes on and from Japan
First impressions of a country are vastly underrated; here are some of mine from a recent trip to Japan.
It’s been a few weeks since H. and I returned from our trip to Japan.
The trip itself now feels like a dream, as vague and alluring as the fantasies that proceeded it.
Rather than summarize or synthesize my various observations from the trip, I’ve arranged them semi-haphazardly by subject below.
If you’d like to look at more photos from the trip, I’ve created a separate post here.
On Japan, broadly speaking
I’ve never visited a place that feels both so welcoming yet foreign. Welcoming in the sense that it’s easy to get around, enough people speak English, it’s full of Western brands, there’s a vending machine waiting for you every time you need a snack, and the service culture is in a league of its own. Foreign, in that you’ve never seen quieter crowds or subways; you can take two random lefts in a dense residential neighborhood and find a gourmet popcorn shop; there are 15-story malls with entire levels dedicated to stationary, backpacks, outdoor gear, etc.… Everything is familiar, but you’re in a completely different world.
The ease of getting around is uncanny. There doesn’t seem to be a place in Japan that isn’t reachable by some combination of bus and train. It feels as if the transit system has your day mapped out long before you’ve decided where it is you want to go; if you “got off the beaten path,” there’d still be a bus station there.
Japan has over 5.5 million vending machines. Approximately one for every 23 people.
Little hints of superior efficiency: the gates to enter the subway station only close if you don’t pay, vs. opening every time someone does. This means each gate can process thousands of continuous commuters without them needing to slow to push through a turnstile. (It helps when you know almost everyone will pay, whereas NYC’s MTA loses $315 million a year to fare evasion.)
Never have I felt more comfortable shitting in public. You can be confident, everywhere, that leaving your hotel, if you need to use the toilet, you’ll find one as clean as your bathroom back home.
Starbucks, Wendy’s, McDonalds, Blue Bottle. Japan feels superficially American, yet deeply Japanese.
On Tokyo
Four million people pass through Shinjuku Station each day. Our hotel was around the corner, and the station was our portal to the rest of Tokyo. We used the same entrance to enter each time, but were never able to find it on our return journey home. Every single time, we left a different way. Re-tracing our steps was impossible, and yet we never got lost — there was always a set of signs waiting to steer us home.
There are whole neighborhoods in Tokyo that look thrown up overnight, and in a sense, they were.
Tokyo, visually, at the level of “landscape,” is much uglier than one might guess. At no time is this more obvious than taking the train out of town to Hakone. Dull, interchangeable apartment buildings line the train’s path, their empty concrete balconies stacked like broken jaws.
During World War II, sixteen square miles of central Tokyo were destroyed by firebombing, and it shows. The city looks like it was built in a hurry to accommodate crowds who needed functional living spaces, rather than beautiful neighborhoods.
The neon lights at night help offset the overwhelming gray of each day.
On silence, politeness, fantasy and crowds
The most amazing and memorable moment from the trip: a sudden summer rainstorm creates a backlog on the trains. The crowds on the platform are incredible, dense, yet calm. Everyone wordlessly boards the train like we’re all silverware being put in the drawer. It’s the most crowded subway I’ve ever been on. And yet it’s so, so quiet — you can hear the rain dripping from our clothes onto the floor.
The silence is not only auditory, but visual as well: a two-floor H&M is filled only with clothes that are either black, white, gray.
At a breakfast cafe, we’re surrounded by salarymen. There’s a smoking room in the corner that can fit three at a time. Without needing to speak, line-up, or make eye contact, the men all take turns, fairly and efficiently. The next one up has his cigarette ready; the one after him is rolling his own; the third one has just removed his kit from his bag; the fourth is still sipping his coffee. It’s as if they’re all part of one synchronized machine. There’s never a queue or disagreement about whose turn it is next. And not one of them hesitates to leave their laptop, wallet, and other belongings unattended on their table while they smoke. There’s no camaraderie or fear; only polite coordination.
In Japan, nothing needs to be said for everyone to get along. In fact, you come away convinced that might be the only way to get along.
I can imagine lighting a firecracker in a Tokyo crowd and it being summarily ignored. I can imagine the same thing happening in Times Square. In Japan, my crass attempt for attention wouldn’t be indulged; in New York, it’d be drowned out by others doing the same.
On the subway, a man across from us in a corporate suit is reading some bright, glittery anime book, on whose cover a young girls’ breasts are on the verge of bursting out of her bra. In an anime store, all the patrons are politely dressed, reading books covered with soldiers, knights, killer robots and demons.
Flaubert’s advice for artists ("Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work") seems applicable to the everyday worker in Japan: live plainly and orderly in your everyday actions, so you can indulge in the most lurid, extra-sensorial fantasies.
H. observes, astutely: every flesh-and-blood woman is conservatively clothed, while every anime girl (even the dolls) is scantily clad.
Does it make you feel safe, knowing that the realm of fantasy (both violent and sexual) is so clearly cordoned off? Or are you reminded of the atrocities of imperial Japan?
Re: service culture
Politeness personified: a young man jumping out of the photo I was trying to take of two parallel rows of trees. He was crossing between them fifty yards away, saw my camera, then jumped for cover. I still caught him, perhaps to his shame.
There’s no toilet seat covers, and they don’t appear needed. Everyone trusts everyone to clean up after themselves.
Japan is welcoming in a way that doesn’t let you ever slip past the surface. Like a theme park, all your needs are provided for; everyone smiles as they hand you your change; you’re never tempted to ask, what’s behind all these walls?
Upon leaving every restaurant, the entire staff bows, smiles, and waves. Upon leaving a one-man sake bar, he walks us out to the street and again bows and waves. It feels exceedingly friendly, but also impersonal, as if the ritualized service is meant to preempt and preclude any messier, more human exchange.
And yet, how delightful: a front desk clerk at our 130-year-old traditional ryokan (i.e. a Japanese inn) has the timetable memorized for the bus to the train station. He tells us which side of the train to sit on for the best views. And as we board the bus, we see him walk down the driveway. He smiles and bows as we pull away.
On rock gardens and temples
Rocks vs flowers; flowers tell a story. We see our lives mirrored in their own progression from seed into flower then death. Much harder to assign human emotions to rocks. They’re not a metaphor for life, but only silence and stillness. That which is so perfectly present, it exists outside of time.
During a night walk through Fushimi Inari’s endless red gates, H. and I discuss the implicit spiritual message: something like the importance of stacking little, repeatable wins, versus a single epiphanic, life-altering turn.
Kyoto reminds us of Philadelphia. A well-balanced mix of the historic and the contemporary. We spend the morning at a temple; in the evening, we stumble into some young person’s bar, where we’re served greasy food by chefs who don’t look old enough to drink in the States.
On the value of first impressions
First impressions of a country may be underrated on relative terms. You’ll still be mostly ignorant after two weeks anywhere, but is that not also true for ten, twenty years? When I think about what the average American knows about America, I lose what guilt I have making statements about Japan, which I know are inherently narrow, overzealous, and incomplete.
I get the sense, reading the accounts of ex-pats who have lived in Japan for thirty years, that you never get past “first impressions” of Japan. The outer layer itself just grows thicker with nuance. The mystery is in the surface, rather than the depth.
On being abroad
The freedom of being a foreigner: local elections seem to be coming up. A few subway walls are plastered with posters. I don’t know who any of the candidates are, what they’re promising to deliver, who they’re promising to defeat. What expectations they’ll inevitably disappoint.
A feeling, while traveling, that I used to mistake as simply the desire to travel more, to fit more trips into an over-scheduled life — but which is actually the more banal, impossible desire to live multiple lives. To not just visit more countries, but to be a native of Madrid, Kyoto, São Paulo, New York. To not just visit new places but have memories of them; to not just meet new people but actually have their inner experience.
Everyone wants to be somebody else, even if only a better version of themselves; traveling, I feel the desire to be everyone else, both the living and dead. I suddenly want to know this universe a hundred billion different ways.
Recommended books:
Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons: A rather cynical take on Japan’s modernization. A series of essays mixing memoir, economic history, and a discussion of Japan’s traditional arts. One of Kerr’s more memorable observations is that contemporary Japan is covered in power lines, despite having the ability to put them underground. And indeed, once I read that, I saw power lines everywhere, even in the rural hills of Hakone, outside temples, lining the waterways, etc.
Pico Iyer’s A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations: A book that illuminates the Japan-ness of modern Japan. A cheerful, thought-provoking collection of “notes,” most of which are only a few sentences. A delightful read for someone as they’re traveling through Japan.