When you enter Japan, they screen you for fever, fingerprint you, take your picture, pass your luggage through scanners, and question you searchingly. When they finally clear you, you feel like you've gotten away with some terrible crime.
The airport is a well-maintained 1970s sci-fi fantasy: Styling that was futuristic thirty years ago and lots of machines with big plastic buttons. I take a shuttle to Akasaka. Before it leaves, a woman gets on with a placard in several languages. The English text reads, Please fasten seatbelt by decree. She holds it up, walks to the back of the bus, back to the front, turns to face us, bows deeply, and gets off again.
The hotel room is the smallest I've ever seen, and the bathroom is the most interesting. On the table when I check in is a laminated sheet with instructions on operating the shower; I toss it aside lightly, then have to hunt for it and study it carefully when the time comes. The room also has one of Japan's famous electronic toilets. Not a very elaborate one, as they go, but it stilll has a heated seat and an electronic control panel. One button on the panel is red; it stops all toilet functions. Japanese toilets have panic buttons. And if that doesn't work, you can always suit up, float into its central processing room, and pull out circuit boards to disable its brain.
Tokyo's not a steel-and-glass boomtown like Bangkok or even Hong Kong. Much of the city looks to date from the 80s, when the Nikkei was at 40,000, a parking space in Ginza was worth as much as Australia, and Neuromancer and Blade Runner forecast Japan-dominated futures. Since then, Japan's been a byword for economic malaise. There weren't many cranes on the skyline of Tokyo. At the same time, of course, you don't neeed a lot of new buildings when your population is shrinking, and it will take a few more decades of rot before Japan has social problems severe enough to be noticeable by someone from North America.
Apart from cuteness. Cuteness (kawaii) is Japan's one great social evil. I saw 70-year-old men with pink stuffed animals hanging off their backpacks. Decorators and designers work from the same palette as confectioners. It feels sometimes like one sixth-grade bully from North America could take the city over. By Tokyo standards, I felt I was a fairly dangerous man. Living in Toronto made me more or less from the streets.
The Japanese are fantastically polite. Full subway cars are eerily quiet: No one talks on the phone, and if you have to cough, you cough like a butler trying to attract the attention of a duchess. People who are unwell wear surgical masks. On the platform, guards with white gloves stand, making announcements and sometimes directing human traffic (at rush hour, their duties include shoving people onto packed cars, but I didn't go anywhere near the subway at rush hour).
Everything undignified or indecorous that you don't see in public spills out in a dangerously concentrated form when you turn on the TV. Japanese TV is great, and it's not necessary to understand Japanese. If you're ever watching Japanese TV and there's nothing obviously weird going on, just keep watching: They're building to something.
On a typical run through the channels:
I went to Shibuya, a famous shopping district of multistorey illuminated signs popular with the young and stylish. I sat in a restaurant over the street and looked down on the scramble crossings, the busiest in the world; great shoals of elaborate haircuts surged in every direction. I went into Taito Station, a video arcade; the main floor was devoted to elaborate claw crane games done up as cutely as possible, and the floor below was mostly Streetfighter LXVII, or whatever version Streetfighter is up to. At the back, there was a smoky gambling area; in one corner, there was a mechanical horse racing track with one middle-aged guy hunched over the counter and 11 empty seats.
For whatever reason, Christmas was a big deal in Tokyo, as it had been in Hong Kong. Hotels, stores, cafes, and restaurants played Christmas carols (rap versions were popular) and displayed Christmas trees. I tried to do some Christmas shopping. If you ignore the products that are the same in the West, though, it's about twice as hard as shopping at home; not only do you have to decide whether someone would like something, you also have to work out what the hell it is.
On a walk back from the grounds of the imperial palace, I passed a group of four heavily made-up Tokyo goths. Three of them were posing for photographs and generally showing off, and one was squatting off to the side touching up his makeup with the aid of a handheld mirror. There's supposed to be a much larger and more outlandish meeting of Tokyo subcultures around the entrance to the Meiji shrine on Sundays. I went and had a look. There were two teenagers in costume, posing for a picture with a tourist; a 'free hugs' group; and two men in their 40s, one with a sign that said 'Welcome to Japan / Let's talk easily' and one wearing a shopworn Hello Kitty head and sunglasses, whose sign said 'I'm your father'. A disappointing haul. Maybe it was the wrong place or the wrong time.
The airport is a well-maintained 1970s sci-fi fantasy: Styling that was futuristic thirty years ago and lots of machines with big plastic buttons. I take a shuttle to Akasaka. Before it leaves, a woman gets on with a placard in several languages. The English text reads, Please fasten seatbelt by decree. She holds it up, walks to the back of the bus, back to the front, turns to face us, bows deeply, and gets off again.
The hotel room is the smallest I've ever seen, and the bathroom is the most interesting. On the table when I check in is a laminated sheet with instructions on operating the shower; I toss it aside lightly, then have to hunt for it and study it carefully when the time comes. The room also has one of Japan's famous electronic toilets. Not a very elaborate one, as they go, but it stilll has a heated seat and an electronic control panel. One button on the panel is red; it stops all toilet functions. Japanese toilets have panic buttons. And if that doesn't work, you can always suit up, float into its central processing room, and pull out circuit boards to disable its brain.
Tokyo's not a steel-and-glass boomtown like Bangkok or even Hong Kong. Much of the city looks to date from the 80s, when the Nikkei was at 40,000, a parking space in Ginza was worth as much as Australia, and Neuromancer and Blade Runner forecast Japan-dominated futures. Since then, Japan's been a byword for economic malaise. There weren't many cranes on the skyline of Tokyo. At the same time, of course, you don't neeed a lot of new buildings when your population is shrinking, and it will take a few more decades of rot before Japan has social problems severe enough to be noticeable by someone from North America.
Apart from cuteness. Cuteness (kawaii) is Japan's one great social evil. I saw 70-year-old men with pink stuffed animals hanging off their backpacks. Decorators and designers work from the same palette as confectioners. It feels sometimes like one sixth-grade bully from North America could take the city over. By Tokyo standards, I felt I was a fairly dangerous man. Living in Toronto made me more or less from the streets.
The Japanese are fantastically polite. Full subway cars are eerily quiet: No one talks on the phone, and if you have to cough, you cough like a butler trying to attract the attention of a duchess. People who are unwell wear surgical masks. On the platform, guards with white gloves stand, making announcements and sometimes directing human traffic (at rush hour, their duties include shoving people onto packed cars, but I didn't go anywhere near the subway at rush hour).
Everything undignified or indecorous that you don't see in public spills out in a dangerously concentrated form when you turn on the TV. Japanese TV is great, and it's not necessary to understand Japanese. If you're ever watching Japanese TV and there's nothing obviously weird going on, just keep watching: They're building to something.
On a typical run through the channels:
- A group of kids dressed as lemons, under the direction of a grown man also dressed as a lemon, chase a woman around a backstage area.
- A group of men dressed in fuzzy animal costumes try to complete a challenge on a game show. Then Santa comes on and gives gifts to a chubby man dressed as a toddler. Then the original group reappears dressed in police uniforms, and play air hockey against Santa and the Toddler (they win, 7-6).
- A woman in a sailor outfit with huge, slanting greasepaint eyebrows interviews a rattlesnake enthusiast in Texas.
- People race a giant snowball downhill using sleds from different countries. (The Canadian toboggan comes third behind an inflatable skeleton and a sort of inner tube, both racing under the Swiss flag.)
I went to Shibuya, a famous shopping district of multistorey illuminated signs popular with the young and stylish. I sat in a restaurant over the street and looked down on the scramble crossings, the busiest in the world; great shoals of elaborate haircuts surged in every direction. I went into Taito Station, a video arcade; the main floor was devoted to elaborate claw crane games done up as cutely as possible, and the floor below was mostly Streetfighter LXVII, or whatever version Streetfighter is up to. At the back, there was a smoky gambling area; in one corner, there was a mechanical horse racing track with one middle-aged guy hunched over the counter and 11 empty seats.
For whatever reason, Christmas was a big deal in Tokyo, as it had been in Hong Kong. Hotels, stores, cafes, and restaurants played Christmas carols (rap versions were popular) and displayed Christmas trees. I tried to do some Christmas shopping. If you ignore the products that are the same in the West, though, it's about twice as hard as shopping at home; not only do you have to decide whether someone would like something, you also have to work out what the hell it is.
On a walk back from the grounds of the imperial palace, I passed a group of four heavily made-up Tokyo goths. Three of them were posing for photographs and generally showing off, and one was squatting off to the side touching up his makeup with the aid of a handheld mirror. There's supposed to be a much larger and more outlandish meeting of Tokyo subcultures around the entrance to the Meiji shrine on Sundays. I went and had a look. There were two teenagers in costume, posing for a picture with a tourist; a 'free hugs' group; and two men in their 40s, one with a sign that said 'Welcome to Japan / Let's talk easily' and one wearing a shopworn Hello Kitty head and sunglasses, whose sign said 'I'm your father'. A disappointing haul. Maybe it was the wrong place or the wrong time.
