"Why I Love Tokyo"

By Andrew Miller
September 2008

Andrew Miller looks back at a lost year in the bewildering and bewitching Japanese capital

Westerners still arrive in Tokyo hoping to find an old Japan of shrines and paper houses, of shy women and inscrutable men. They leave after a week, puzzled and disappointed. Others expect a technological wonderland and find something of that in the department stores of Akihabara, but find something else too, something unexpected, resonant, mysterious.

In my first weeks in Tokyo, the summer of 1994, impression succeeded impression with a rapidity that made assimilation impossible. Other than knowing I was in the capital city of Japan and one of the great concentrations of humanity on the planet, I didn’t really know where I was. As time passed, I seemed to be travelling away from any understanding of the place, to be more and more bewildered, as though I had wondered into a stranger’s dream. Much initial effort went into trying to avoid getting lost or, having become so, into trying to find something – anything – that looked familiar. Each time I left my little apartment in the city’s western suburbs I was never quite sure I would see it again. I would pause at street corners and look back at the way I had come, memorising landmarks but somehow not quite believing in them, as though that blue-tiled roof, or the rattling, pinging pachinko parlour, might have drifted away like incense smoke before I returned.

Summer, hot and humid, is not an easy season in Tokyo. The locals carry little folded cloths to mop the sweat from their faces but staying cool was a struggle. Nights were not much easier. I would lie on my little roll-out mattress, an electric fan whirring beside my head, mosquitoes flying tirelessly above. Some days the air was thick as soup. I longed to escape to the country, to the mountains or the coast, but could hardly be bothered to put on my sandals. Anyway, I was working, moving through the looping guts of the Tokyo transport system, arriving at hard-to-identify places to sing alphabet songs with pre-school children or, in the evenings, to teach English to their older brothers and sisters.

When I wasn’t teaching, I was training. The world headquarters of aikido – ‘the way of harmony’, a martial-art cousin of judo and jujitsu – was in downtown Shinjuku, and by getting off my futon at some unlikely hour of the morning, I could get down there in time for the 8am class or, more heroically, the 6am. Some of my happiest hours in Tokyo were spent in the training hall being hurled around by people who had spent 20, 30, 40 years in the art. The oldest practioners I called the ‘grey belts’ as their black belts, won so long ago, had faded to a ragged pearl colour. Among them were men – and the occasional woman – in their 70s or 80s. I was terrified at first of accidentally killing one of them but soon learnt that I was the one likely to need rescuing.

On days off from teaching, pleasantly weary after my exertions on the mat, I would wander in the curling alleyways of Shinjuku revelling in the ordinary business of the people who lived and worked there: the bar owners, the housewives, schoolgirls in tartan skirts, a monk in saffron. There was a barber’s shop I used to visit where the barber, wearing a surgical mask over his mouth (for his protection or mine?) would shave me – the hairy foreigner – with a thoroughness that included scraping his razor over my forehead, clipping my nasal hairs and plucking the hairs from my ears with tweezers. Hot flannels were laid over my face, then unguents out of curious bell jars were rubbed vigorously into my skin while the man’s daughter used her cupped hands to massage my shoulders. It was not an expensive indulgence – Japan can be surprisingly good value – but I came out feeling like Lucky Luciano.

September means typhoons, and a certain historic nervousness. Days of warm swirling rain, inescapable rain. Everything rots. Then, quite suddenly, the fug of summer is blown away by the first cool breezes of the autumn. As the mornings turned chilly, I would buy a can of hot sweet coffee from the vending machines by my local station, sipping it between the swaying and dozing salarymen on the Toei-Shinjuku line.

When did the snow come? December? February? I cannot quite remember, but have a vivid recollection of walking home one afternoon through the grounds of the Shinto shrine in Motoyawata and seeing a winter wedding, the bride in her silken hood, the groom sombre in his hakama. To keep off the snow, the wedding party carried umbrellas of lacquered paper. The couple, shy and serious, paused for photos then, on wooden sandals, everyone tottered off, while behind them, on the frozen water of the purification trough, the snow continued its soft descent. I could have stayed forever (I almost did), feeding on the city’s casual poetry – a creature lost in translation, but perfectly content to be so.


Note: This is NOT my own work - I copied this from a website, because it's one travel article that I really like. 

Much love,

Sarah.