Tokyo 2007

‘Too convenient and too complex’

Five Days in Tokyo

It amazes me. You get off the plane, you get your bags, you look at the map and the directions you have scribbled on a bit of paper tucked inside your carry on bag, you negotiate some transport and you get to the unknown accommodation you booked 40,000km away and the adventure begins. It’s so simple. Most of the time. An exercise in total trust in the travelling gods, in guidebook writers, in your instincts and in the first taxi driver that crosses your path.



My first experience of this was Tokyo. I was going to Europe but decided to go via Tokyo for a few days. I’d taught a lot of Japanese students as an English language teacher and it had sparked my interest. I had even entertained the idea of working there a couple of years earlier and enrolled in an evening class to learn the language. I could only remember a handful of phrases; sumimasen (which means excuse me) was one which was going to be particularly useful over the next five days.

That first night I had got into the airport quite late and booked into a local airport hotel to have a decent sleep and to put off having to actually navigate the subway .I’d come with few expectations of Tokyo but plenty of reservations, most of them were about the subway system. I’d been staring at the densely packed interweaving lines of the subway map for the last few weeks. I’d been dreaming about it and waking up with night sweats. My sense of direction was not great at the best of times, even in my home town of Sydney I had mainly relied on others to get me around for the last 27 or so odd years. But now (terrifyingly, electrifyingly) there was only me, a lone aussie red head in a city of 20 million armed with some scrappy directions, a phrase book and a jammed packed backpack, which 12 hours into my trip was already digging into my shoulders and limiting the blood flow to my arms. I arrived at the hotel, got to my room which had an Ashai beer vending machine outside it. I took it as an omen. A good one.

Kampai (which means Cheers)

The next day I set off to get into the real Tokyo. It is hot. It is hotter carrying my backpack. A man on the train platform looks at me bemused and says 'Strong'. I wonder how the women around me manage to look so manicured and fresh. A woman worries when traveling by herself, but I was comforted, coldly comforted, by the fact that perhaps the Japanese wouldn’t recognize me as being a woman.

I am sweltering. There are many beautiful times to come to Japan, it is becoming quite the hotspot in winter for skiing, and is spectacular in May when the Cherry Blossoms are in full bloom. The one time all the guidebooks will tell you not to arrive in the whole year is June and August. It is hot and humid and likely to rain. I arrived in Japan on the 20th of June.

Rendering my weeks of worry useless, I get the train to Asakusa station with no hassles or confusion. Asakusa hits me with its Temple, tourists, traffic and an unusually high amount of sequined shoes stores. I have a few hours to wait before I can get into the hostel, drop off my bags and start to really explore. I wonder down to the Sumida River and get my first glimpse of what has become one of Tokyo’s infamous landmark – the giant beer bubble above the Asahi main office (It looks like a giant poo, one of my Japanese friends told me. It does. A giant gold coated poo). I sit in the park for a while and rest. It seems to be something that a lot of other people are doing as well. They don’t really seem to notice me, or pretended not to. Maybe they had other things on their mind. My friend Megumi later explained to me that where I had stretched out that first day, waiting for my hostel to open, was where the homeless people go and I, unknowingly, had parked myself and my bag right in the middle of them. Sumimasen

A colleague at work who had spent some time in Japan had remarked how reasonable the hostel was that I had booked. In a moment of paranoia I had booked myself into a female only room so was a little surprised to get into my room and find a laddish block of a bloke from Newcastle who warned me that the quite young Japanese guy on the top bunk had swiped twenty yen off him. He then proceeded to tell me about the Hostel movies he had recently seen and asked had I. He instantly reminded me of the sun drenched boys from up North which I knew from back home. There was something reassuring on that first real night away, after hours of walking round getting my bearings and trying to work out how to order my soba noodles through a vending machine ( why couldn’t I just ask the man behind the counter?) to get back to the hostel and fall asleep to the sound of the beer-induced snores coming from his adjacent bunk.

Tokyo is known for its technological edginess, so the irony that I couldn’t get the only two pieces of technology I relied on, my phone and my hair straightener, to work was not lost on me. (I found out later that the global roaming on my phone that was guaranteed to work internationally couldn’t work in Japan because their telecommunications network was ‘too advanced’. As for the hair iron, well, that to this day remains a technological mystery.)

No thanks to my phone but many thanks to a speedy internet connection I was able to meet up with two of my old students, M and M. I had nicknamed them double trouble when they were at my school in Sydney. This was mostly due to M No 1’s ability to tease me mercilessly. It had started with my rather funky green cardigan that had these holes near the wrist band so that you could put your thumbs through. ‘Poor teacher' M No 1 had teased, ‘she has holes in her clothes’. I had retaliated that I had to be nice to her and show her respect because she was older than me. Somewhere amongst the playful jibes, or perhaps because of them, we had become friends. M No 2 was joined at the hip with M No 1 when she was in Sydney. She always seemed a bit shocked but awed by M No 1 comments and when she smiled she didn’t just smile she beamed. I liked her immediately.

I had emailed and organized to meet them near the Asakusa train station exit that comes out near the ice cream store (there were five exits). And there they were; punctual and armed with pretty umbrellas (including one for me), English and Japanese tourists guides and diamantes on their high heeled shoes. Just gorgeous. God I wished my hair iron had been working. Sumimasen

We went to the Edo museum, a remarkable building housing truly remarkable things but to be honest it was all a bit lost on me. I was much too distracted by double trouble and the constant giggling.

The giggling subsided over lunch as we focused our attention on food .Oh the food – if I had to eat one type of food for the rest of my life it would be Japanese. We had some little Japanese restaurant in some little back street in gods know what part of Tokyo and my friends ordered Okonomiyaki. “Looks like vomit” M No 2 commented as our meal, as it was cooked on the hot plate in the middle of our table. Yes, it did look like vomit. But it tasted like salty goodness. This was my little taste of real Tokyo, washed down with a local beer.

After lunch we went to Odaibo. A strange man made island in the middle of Tokyo Bay with futuristic shopping centres, luxiourous hotels and a replica of the Statue of Liberty. And you have to take this super fast train to get there .Super fun.

Over cakes and coffee (although, Japan, not really the place to get coffee) the friendship and the cultural exchange deepened. I explained the difference between get on and get it on and they explained about Japanese men, smaller but harder. I was impressed. The girls were really nailing their comparative adjectives.

Later, over dinner, we sat together sipping sake looking down on the colorful lights on the cluster of ferries bobbing up and down on Tokyo Bay. And the endless Tokyo skyline that stretched out and up behind it. Oh Tokyo. So pretty from a distance. Exhilarating.

The next day it was Saki and sightseeing. Saki was also a former student turned present friend. We shared the same birthday and in a class of nine she had been the only girl. We bonded. We decided on the Emperor’s Gardens and Tokyo Tower. On asking her if they were good places to go, she said she had never been to them. ‘For tourists’, she said. What can I say the gardens were lovely and Tokyo Tower had a vertigo-inducing glass floor that I would rather not think about. But about a five minute walk from the tower was the temple that Sakiko family went to every New Year to get their fortune for the year. She took me there to get mine. It says travel is good but to look after myself. My fortune comes with a little gold- plated charm that I carry around in my wallet for the rest of the year.

We end up in Ginza, the international label laden brightly lit streets of Ginza. Saki takes me to this Japanese restaurant where all the tables are inside these replica igloos. I love it. We make jokes about big men trying to squash into them for business lunches and swap pictures of my sister's wedding and then her sister's wedding. We talk about travel. We talk about Japan. ‘Japan’ she remarks ‘too convenient and too complex’. I think about the Asahii vending machines, the metro ticketing system, the machines in the entrances to shops that dry your vasa (umbrella).

We call it a night and I wonder when or if our paths will cross again. I go back to hostel, lie on my bed and feel very disturbed after reading Banana Yokomoto’s haunting short stories. There is a bit of a niggling pain around two of my remaining two wisdom teeth. And I have a bit of a sort throat. I rationalize it away with my prediction that a good night’s sleep and two Nurofen will take care of it. The pain wakes me up a four a.m. More painkillers and I am finding it difficult to open my jaw.


The next morning I can barely get my mouth open to brush my teeth. It hurts. A lot. And I find myself counting the down the minutes until I can take another dose of Nurifen. Bugger, Bugger Bugger Bugger. I had planned to get out of Tokyo for the day and visit Kamakura and see the giant Buddhist statue. No zen for me today.

I comfort myself with the fact if I get really sick I do have friends here. This is not a drama. Just need to find a dentist. Just need to check with my insurance first. Just need to call my insurance company. Just need to do that.

But my mobile doesn’t work. I find a pay phone and try to call the international number of my insurance agency. And try. And try again. Not working. My tooth is really hurting. They have another number but I need to pay. The pay phone doesn’t take coins and or money. I try to get an operator. I can’t speak ( or understand) Japanese. I go and buy a phone card. I follow the directions. It should work. It should work. It doesn’t work. My tooth throbs and there are still two hours before I can take any more Nurofen. Coffee will help. I go to Starbucks. The Starbucks has one of those devices that you place your umbrella in and it dries it and covers it in plastic. I scowl at it. I don’t need a plastic covered umbrella. I just need to make a phone call.

Buoyed by caffeine, I go into the Asakusa tourist information centre. I try the phone there and somehow manage to get in contact with an American international operating service. The pre-recorded voice tells me it will be sixty dollars to connect the call. Sixty American dollars. I am not that desperate to get in contact with my insurance company…yet.

I ask for help at information desk. Sumimasen. Fortunately they have a little more English then I have Japanese. I ask why my phone card won’t work here. It’s only for national calls. That phone company only deals with national calls. I ask which card I should buy for international calls. They don’t know. But they are very helpful and try the phone numbers for me and I don’t have the heart to tell them that the numbers they are dialing aren’t going to work to because they are the exact combinations I have been trying for about an hour. Together we reach a stalemate with the telephone. I am sure there must be an easy way to make an international phone call; we all know there must be. We just don’t know what it is. What they do know is where there is a dentist surgery with a dentist who speaks a little English. About thirty metres down the street. At last. Something easy.

A little English is right. Very little. I lay back in the dentist chair and point to my back left teeth. I find my phrase book and point to ‘antibiotics’. Yes, he says. He sorts me out with a prescription and even sends one of his nurses with me to go to the pharmacists to get it filled. I am so grateful I want to hug them all.

The next day, antibiotics in system, dosed up on Nurofen, I take a cruise down the Sumida River. It is a grey and rainy day which matches my mood. We cruise up the river. Much of Tokyo’s homeless live next to the river in make-do tents made out of blue plastic. They dot the cement banks all the way up to Tokyo Harbour. In the afternoon I wonder round the shops at Asakusa. A man in an expensive looking gold car pulls up next to me and says hello. I say hello back. He indicates that he would like to have a drink. I think that is what he meant. I shake my head politely and walk to into the next shop. He is still there when I get out and says hello again. This is getting a little uncomfortable. I walk into the next shop and spend a long time looking at some brightly bejeweled handbags hoping he will be gone by the time I leave. He’s not and is ever so persistent that I join him. My heart thumps a little in my chest and my head goes into overdrive calculating how many days I would have to be missing before anyone would think to notify the authorities. I quickly pass in front of the car and duck into the markets, where there is no road you can drive down. I figure no matter how much he would like a drink with me, he is going to like his car more and won’t leave it.

I lose him but feel a little shaky when I get back to the hostel. This is not helped by the fact that later that night there are raised voices downstairs between the owner of the hostel and cleaning staff. And the Japanese very rarely raise their voices. At least it has gotten my mind off the pain throbbing in the back of my mouth. The American guy across the hall say he is happy to get out of here. Maybe I have been reading to much of Banana Moto but I feel spooked. I think the spirits of Tokyo are telling me it’s time to go. And it is.

I get to back to the airport hotel early the next day. Order room service, take painkillers and watch BBC World News replaying their main story that tomorrow is Tony Blair’s last day as Prime Minister. It seems fitting as tomorrow I fly to London. Goodbye Tony. Hello ME!

.