Travel Diaries #11 - WTF
First steps in a new country aren't always as smooth as you'd hope. Airports help you manage the transition between worlds, but after that, you're on your own.
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“Thank you for your co-operation.”
It’s not a robot voice croaking at me from the machine spitting out my train ticket into Tokyo. The barista’s polite response to our successful transaction has the robotic-on-paper but warm-in-practice efficient homeliness that’s inherent in ever-present in this country, the quaint translation a bit ‘off’ but nothing wrong with it either, rather a pleasant communication that made her smile all the brighter. Japan’s culturally ingrained politeness, efficiency and hospitality was relaxing me bit by bit, for someone who’d just landed in this very-foreign land with a one-way ticket, with everything they own having been lost somewhere along the way.
Normally non-places are the bane of any traveller’s life, but right now I was grateful for the existence of Narita airport, even if I had to inevitably leave as soon as I could. Airports serve as a kind of fake warm-up zone before you get to the real world of where you’re actually travelling to, safe spaces where you can practice basic tasks: examine currency by holding it up close to you with one eye closed; observe local mannerisms and communication; and converse with people who have perfect English and whose job it is to deal with idiots at airports.
I’m grateful too for the hour-long train journey which gives me further time to decompress and then hopefully re-compress myself before I have to go through the business of living in this wondrous new home I’d just landed in. For how long – I wasn’t yet even sure. It could be argued that trains are non-places too, though I would argue they’re historically and culturally important and ubiquitous enough that they’re not. They do give an opportunity to live a little: to read books, to look out windows (airports don’t usually offer views of the real world) and to observe more ordinary aspects of life in your new environment, though still an on-rails and prescriptive experience.
Passengers embark and disembark at various suburban stations like they’re performing walk-in parts in a play where each individual or group carries out its own plotline, separate from the others. I savour the train journey as a threshold before I enter the real world of Tokyo, with the sharp January sun piercing through the windows and disrupting the dosing commuters and be-suited office workers, flanked by youths and elderly women buried deep in phone-based gaming and news consumption. Schoolkids in uniform – blazers, ties and flawlessly-set caps all still in full use here – hop on and off as we entered suburban territory. All so reassuringly familiar to anyone, from anywhere.
I was just happy to be back in the land of vending machines, temples, mountain worship and cartoon-animated news feeds, and let it all push worries about where my luggage was going to end up out of mind. It contained most things I owned at that time, as I’d applied for a year-long working holiday visa while home for Christmas, a lengthy detour across the world from Hanoi, where I’d just left after almost three years working as an English teacher.
I was getting a bus first thing in the morning to Hakuba in Nagano prefecture, near the inside apex of Japan’s main island, the boomerang-shaped Honshu. A job working in a ski lodge awaited me there, as did a winter of endless snow at one of Japan’s biggest ski resorts (and ideally my bag containing all my belongings). Beyond that, the school year in Japan would begin in April; a rough plan was to perhaps stay on and find a teaching job once the winter was winding down and my savings were running out. Where, I didn’t know; I’d visited once before and Japan in my mind it was a place where I’d be happy anywhere, as long as everything was in Japanese. Japanese, that is, being a language that I didn’t – and still don’t – speak.
I climb out of Higashi-Nihombashi station, squinting back the sun, and here I am, again, in the biggest city in the world, by someone’s measure. Tokyo gets little snow, though the winter air is fresh, the city overlain with a blanket of sky blue that offers loving reassurance there’s no chance of rain. Certain vantage points offer glimpses of distant snow-capped peaks through the steel and concrete skyscrapers. A place that was a by-word for unsustainable population and pollution when I was growing up was surprisingly clear of both air contamination and human activity. Small, box-shaped electric cars glided silently along immaculately paved and lined tarmac roads, giving the impression they’re that bit closer to a smooth on-rails driverless future we’re currently attempting to dream up in the west.
The new world is bright and the skies are clear blue, but there’s an eerie lack of people on the lunchtime streets. Perhaps they’re all at work, in their jobs, flat out in the famously strict lifelong professional routines of their native country. I wonder if I’ll ever have those things here, I don’t even have a definite timeline for my trip or any work commitments beyond the next few months. I know nobody, and nobody says hello; even though I stick out like a sore thumb, nobody even notices that I’m here. The entire city is empty and paved with opportunity, in a sense, but it’s the limitless opportunity of chaotic freedom. You need something familiar to hold on to.
It was exciting, but a step into a lot of unknowns, again. I’d already moved my whole life across the world to one Asian country, and knew so well that it required considerable time and energy just to settle in such a place – even a year is optimistic. Long before that I’d spent a year in Canada, when I was just out of college and had enough naivety to go with my youthful enthusiasm to make anything work. Summers in the States, a winter in France, a year or two here and there in Dublin.
I was already in love, again, with Japan, almost a pre-meditated and calculated move of the heart, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe I’d have been happy just to visit? Maybe I just needed a holiday, or a ski trip for a week or two. Maybe kissing a Japanese girl would cure me of whatever travel itch I needed to scratch, or I could have just gone for sushi while I was at home. A question always working away in my mind when I travel somewhere, no matter for what purposes or how long I’m there, is “What would it be like to live here?” My curiosity about the place didn’t mean I had to move my whole life over to the other side of the world, again. Maybe I’d just gotten too carried away with these experiments. Could I really be bothered doing all this again?
Everywhere I look there is writing in a language I know nothing of; I am functionally illiterate. I’m looking for a combini – the type of hyper-unreal non-space supermarket that in any other situation provides nothing of nutritional or utilitarian value, but in this country provides a lifeline of familiarity from the last time I was here – in the hope of being able to purchase a spare pair of socks and a cheap t-shirt, as right now I own nothing else.
Smells of simmering soups and stale ashtrays waft from beautiful small restaurants and stores with ornate hoardings and sign-work, long-established businesses and professions in a long-established culture that offers little deviation from that established core – and, you’d have to assume – not much room to squeeze into these establishments in any sense for someone like me. The skies are blue and silent, emptier than the streets, the air itself devoid of humidity and humanity. The slow-burning question-slash-realisation grows up around my body like a subtle wave as I shuffle slowly down the road, Google map in hand, trying to scab the wi-fi off the 7/11, laden down with a backpack, too many jackets, and an airplane neck pillow, all hopes and dreams quickly starting to dawn on me at once:
“What the hell am I doing in Japan?”
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