by Karen Sandness
Many foreign visitors hate Tokyo, especially if they have arrived unprepared and hopped into a cab at Narita Airport, expecting a quick trip to the center of town. Forty miles and $160 later, they are understandably peeved, especially after they find out they could have saved 80 to 90 percent by taking the bus or train. Then they stay at one of the well-known hotels recommended in the major guidebooks, and it looks just like any hotel anywhere in the world, only with smaller rooms and more outrageous prices in the restaurants. Looking outside, they see a cityscape of gray concrete buildings, noisy, traffic-clogged streets, and people in business attire pacing down the sidewalk with briefcases and shopping bags. McDonalds, Dairy Queen, and KFC are flashing their all-too-familiar neon signs. The radio plays American rock music. The TV set in the room offers CNN and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Visitors to Japan with heads full of period movies and woodblock prints find nary a samurai, geisha, or rickshaw. "Tokyo is too big," they declare, "too confusing, too ugly, too expensive, and too Americanized! I'm getting out of here and looking for the real Japan."
Good luck. The only place you'll see samurai walking around is at a movie studio, and real geisha are found mostly in one neighborhood of Kyoto. Enterprising young men have recently revived the rickshaw for lugging giggling groups of schoolgirls around famous historical sights, but no one has used the human-powered carts as serious transportation for decades.
You can still find peaceful country villages with thatched houses and rice paddies, but as much as I hate to disillusion all the Kurosawa fans, Tokyo and places like it are the real Japan for most contemporary Japanese.
No one would deny that Tokyo is big, especially if you include the substantial cities of Chiba,
Kawasaki, and Yokohama, which border on it to form a megalopolis the size of greater Los
Angeles. I first got an inkling of just how big Tokyo is on my third day there back in 1977,
when I went up to the roof garden of a department store in the center of town and took in a 360
degree view of gray and white buildings stretching off and blending into the hazy,
overcast sky. The only breaks in the monotony were the green grounds of the Imperial Palace and
the recently built skyscrapers around Shinjuku Station.
To give a ground-based perspective, it takes over an hour to travel from the western edge of urbanization in Hachioji to central Tokyo by express commuter train. Once you're off the train, you encounter the confusing aspect of the city, because few Tokyo streets have names, and the few names that do exist are not used in street addresses. Instead, the central city is divided into twenty-three wards (ku), which function much like the boroughs of New York City. Each ku is divided into several cho, many of which were independent towns before being swallowed up by the city. The cho are then subdivided into chome, which are numbered. Within each chome, the blocks are numbered, and the lots on each block are numbered in turn, although not consecutively.
In practical terms, this means that display advertisements typically include maps showing prospective customers how to reach the place of business from the nearest transit stop. If you are invited to a Japanese home, your hosts usually meet you at the nearest transit stop or send you a map giving directions to their house. In the absence of such guidance, you must either acquire a city atlas that shows all the numbered blocks or find the nearest police substation (koban) and ask the officers on duty to consult their map of the neighborhood that has the names of all the residents written in. It's easy to get lost, but getting lost is simply part of the Tokyo experience for visitors and residents alike, and the low crime rate means that nothing bad is likely to happen to you.
The impressive transit system serving the megalopolis takes you to just about any destination without a car. The broad outlines of the transit system are formed by above-ground commuter trains, laced together with an ever-expanding spider web of subway lines. Private rail lines peel off from major commuter train stations or department stores to carry suburban commuters to and fro. If the rail system doesn't take you quite within walking distance of your destination, there's always a bus to fill in the gaps, and if public transit doesn't meet your needs, you can flag down one of the taxis that seem to travel in flocks on all major thoroughfares. I can't imagine why anyone would want to own a car in Tokyo, and the growing rate of automobile ownership must indicate the persuasive powers of television advertisements that show Toyotas or Hondas zooming down deserted roads in Big Sur or pulling up to English country manor houses. Cycling on the main thoroughfares would be an unnerving experience, but it would undoubtedly be possible to plot out safe cycling routes with the aid of one of the city atlases.
Tokyo could never compete with Paris or San Francisco in an urban beauty contest, but if you get off at a train station and just wander around, you'll find that Tokyo is much more interesting than the view from the department store roof would suggest. First of all, the city is alive. There are people everywhere, and they are not just "salarymen" in gray flannel suits or office workers in pert uniforms. Tiny elderly people, survivors of the days of poverty and malnutrition, totter around on bowed legs. Teenagers, carrying leather briefcases and wearing school uniforms that have not changed much in the past sixty or seventy years, stop at a fast food outlet for an after-school snack. Rosy-cheeked elementary school children with caps and backpacks chase one another down the street. Shopkeepers sweep the sidewalks, place their wares out in front of the door, and call out to passersby in hoarse voices: "Irasshai! Irasshai! Come! Come!" A heavily made up woman in an elegant kimono trots off to her job as a bar hostess or waitress in a traditional restaurant.
When I lived in Tokyo, I used to spend Sunday afternoons following one of the city's main thoroughfares just to see what I could see, and I was never disappointed. I found neighborhoods devoted to single commercial products, such as shelves, brushes, books, electronics, or plastic food for restaurant window displays. I watched tatami mats being made. There were shrines and temples in every neighborhood, but one day I came across a temple that looked as if it belonged in Southeast Asia or India. On another walk, I found a nineteenth-century Western-style building that had somehow survived the 1923 earthquake and the fire bombings of the World War II era. A glimpse through the iron gate to someone's house revealed an exquisite garden, and even in the most paved-over areas, people set bonsai and other potted plants at their doorsteps. An incongruous stream in the middle of a residential neighborhood turned out to be a remnant of Tokyo's old system of Venice-like canals. A hulking sumo wrestler in kimono and topknot prayed at a shrine. Golfers practiced at a multi-level driving range tucked in between two buildings. A shrine festival procession appeared out of nowhere in a neighborhood full of banks and department stores. A newly opened business displayed congratulatory wreathes from its neighbors, and a band of four musicians in clownish parodies of traditional dress marched around in front, playing toy instruments. A Shinto priest appeared to be blessing an escalator. An ordinary looking basement club featured traditional Japanese folk music. The signs on the stores, whether written in fractured English or cleverly illustrated Japanese, were a constant source of wonder and amusement. The street running alongside a shopping arcade was lined with fanciful-looking hotels that posted different prices for overnight lodging and for two hours "rest." Old men fished in what was once the moat of Edo Castle. A wild-eyed young man standing on top of a sound truck railed at the crowd of evening commuters, expounding some sort of conspiracy theory. The last of the old-fashioned trolleys rattled through a series of neighborhoods that were fascinating for their sheer ordinariness.
Wherever I went, there was always plenty to eat and drink. I haven't seen any statistics, but I would imagine that no resident of Tokyo is ever more than a hundred meters from a soft drink vending machine. (The legal status of the fabled beer vending machines is uncertain as I write this.) Because young Japanese women often don't learn to cook before marriage and young men rarely learn to cook at all, young singles feed at the small restaurants that are almost as numerous as vending machines. Festivals bring out food and drink vendors. Because drinking is an essential component of business entertainment, there are entire buildings full of little bars that function like private clubs.
If you're not careful, you can end up paying $100 for a couple of drinks or $50 for a simple plate of sushi, but for the well-informed traveler, Tokyo is no more expensive than New York or San Francisco. In some ways, it's even cheaper, because you can stay in a cramped but perfectly clean and respectable (no two-hour rates or drug addicts on the doorstep) "business hotel" for $70 or $80 per night. Food seems expensive, but the display windows with price-marked plastic models or photographs of the menu items found at nearly every restaurant will lead you to the bargains. If you spend more than $15 for a meal, you're not really trying, and if a restaurant doesn't have a display, it's likely to be out of your price range anyway. Coffee may be several dollars per cup at the fancy, atmospheric sit-down coffee shops (by the time the first Starbucks opened in Seattle, the Japanese were already old hands at hanging out in gourmet coffee shops), but the fast-food outlets and "stand bars" offer reasonable caffeine fixes.
The fast food outlets contribute to the superficial impression that Tokyo has become "Americanized," but a visit to a Japanese McDonald's brings you face to face with a smiling, snap-to-it twentysomething who uses the same ultra-polite language as the servers in traditional restaurants and says, "Sorry to keep you waiting," when it has taken all of thirty seconds to fill your order. Convenience stores sell the same odds and ends as their American counterparts, as well as traditional box lunches, but they can also arrange to ship your baggage anywhere in the country. Department stores feature floor after floor of clothing, just like the ones in North America, but also contain art galleries, restaurant arcades, roof gardens, gourmet food shopping in the basement, and sometimes even the terminus of a suburban commuter line. The Japanese are in the running for most TV-addicted nation, but with a difference: their government and commercial broadcast networks feature almost no foreign programming, and Japan is the only country in the world where Dallas flopped. Various forms of teen-age rebellion have been imported into Japan since World War II, but Japanese teens are still capable of coming up with their own astonishing varieties of outlandish dress and behavior, such as the recent "yamanba" look, which included bleached hair, a tanning booth tan with white circles around the eyes, and perilous-looking platform shoes.
I've been acquainted with Tokyo for twenty-four years, and I never get tired of it. It's big but easy to get around in; confusing but safe; ugly but fascinating; expensive but full of inexpensive delights; and modern but--very definitely-- not American.
Karen Sandness
Photo by Michael Wong
