They drive on the left here. Walk on the left, as well. Unless they don’t.
Ten weeks in Japan. The original plan had been to crisscross South America, but a girl I’d met at a Montreal party invited me over, and when the universe sends you an invitation, how can you possibly refuse? Lasted a month. Didn’t work out. Good memories.
Japan is not expensive. Ignore the scaredy gossipers. As of right now, 1 USD = 156 yen. Shorthand: 1,000 yen = just over $6. The absolute cheapest hostels in Tokyo cost 1,200 yen a night, though the accommodations are obviously imperfect. The ones I spent six weeks in would cost about 1,600-2,200 per night. If you shop around, you can find cheap delicious sushi joints where 1,000 yen will get you six or so sushis, far more delicious than back home. A sushi bar in a Kyoto alleyway would serve six sushis and a glass of beer for 990 yen, and that was beautiful…
Sometimes, the pedestrian traffic spontaneously switches sides, and then we all walk on the right.
Judging by the “help wanted” posters I encountered, low-level service jobs pay about 1,500 yen an hour, give or take. Any $15/hour McDonald’s employee in the US makes about 50% more than their Japanese counterpart. Remarkable.
Women here wear skirts. Lots of skirts. Just the skirts, really. No leggings, no blouses or even tank tops – only skirts of wildly varying length and fashion, even in near-freezing weather. A sheltered Victorian’s dream. Sometimes, they would wear microskirts over a pair of sweatpants, and it would look like a strange totemic ritual. I’m not normally one to pay attention to fashion, but when 60% or so of one gender dress the exact same way, that’s quite noticeable. I wonder what specific point in history had influenced this development. Or was there ever one?
Oddly enough, no unusual fashions among men.
It seemed like every single public-facing job had its own uniform. Not merely a lazy reflective outfit, but a colour-matched combo of pants and jacket and shirt and maybe even a badge. Is this stratification or pride or both or neither?
Museums. So many wonderful museums… For the first two weeks, I hadn’t known about Tokyo’s city-wide Grutto pass that unlocked almost 100 museums for 2,500 yen. Good investment.
There was a subway station that had an infinite wave of Tokyo commuters coming up the stairs. Infinite. Far more than any train – than any ten trains – could possibly disgorge. Reality glitches like that sometimes. The equally confused Japanese girl next to me summoned the elevator normally reserved for handicapped folks. We descended in shame.
Art gallery openings multiple times a week. New friendos. Well, at least until I caught some sort of flu in an Osaka hostel, turning into a bit of a zombie. Before that, with an odd gallery opening on Christmas night, I entered a small artist loft to discover five maybe-artists having a communal meal. They stared at me, not having expected anybody to answer their summons. They did not share their snacks.
Sometimes, on a wide enough sidewalk, the pedestrian traffic goes in alternating currents, left right left right, and trying to cross it becomes a strange game of Frogger.
Wildlife encounters, controlled: a shoulder owl at the world’s top owl cafe; handfeeding monkeys on a mountaintop near Kyoto; being bullied by deer in Nara; a man walking 23 dogs at once near Tokyo’s cosplay alley.
Wildlife encounters, hypothetical: a very serious (and graphic) sign at a large temple, warning about bear and boar attacks, especially at night.
About once a week, if I stood perfectly still in a large, wide-open space, with my attention on my phone, a local would slam into my shoulder with all their might and then skedaddle the hell away at top speed. Given that I’m 6’1″ and wear a rather distinctive red coat, that implies either a localized epidemic of inner ear imbalance, or my animal magnetism getting out of whack, or…
The one truly bad experience: Tokyo’s museum of military history. It was a bit of a red flag that it wasn’t covered by the city-wide pass… Inside, nothing but shameless, insultingly lazy propaganda. Apparently, Genghis Khan’s flotilla was defeated (and twice) not by anomalous typhoons (which inspired the word “kamikaze” – “divine wind”) but by plucky Japanese fishermen in their tiny maneuverable boats. There was a huge painting and all. WW2 displays made it sound like Japan went camping and then folks started shooting for no reason, so it had to shoot back… And the plaque on Japan’s occupation of Indonesia was phrased so over-the-top awkwardly that it made me fact-check it on the spot. Verily, they pretended like millions of Indonesians didn’t die during that occupation. Odd, that. The museum was huge and had some impressive displays, but eventually the sum total of lies became overwhelming. Was anything there even real? All those planes and submarines and torpedoes – had they been 3D-printed and painted on site? The experience left me shaking with disgust. Whoever is sponsoring this alleged museum (likely far-right nationalists) do so in order to spread doubt, to provide legitimacy to their lies as they shamelessly rewrite history even as more and more witnesses die of old age. And soon enough, they’ll be able to present their alternative facts as a plausible version of history. For what it’s worth, my Japanese friends felt mighty awkward about that museum’s existence, too.
The 500-yen coin is big and beautiful and shiny. Its value is just over $3, and it lets you roleplay like an old-timey Western cowboy. That single coin can buy you a small meal at McDonald’s, or four small bags of chips, or several cans of beer at a convenience store. And yeah, sure, you can do the same with a $5 bill back home, but there’s something extra-cool about doing that with a single shiny coin, eh.
McDonald’s is omnipresent here. Burger King and Wendy’s have scant outposts, having been defeated in some epic battle years ago. McDonald’s made for a convenient save-point. An infusion of a medium coffee (no large coffees in Japan) and two apple pies cost just 460 yen. Yum.
Things that don’t exist in Japan: free little libraries; trashcans. (Folks carry their garbage home, or dash into a convenience store to drop it off there.)
Things that I’ve seen only in Japan: an enclosed smoking area outdoors (and, rarely, indoors) where giant opaque plastic walls would provide concealment to nicotine addicts. Oddly enough, the actual stench of cigarettes on the subway was rare.
My local friend wanted me to cut my hair, which I’d been growing off and on (I am easily tricked by women with hairdresser aspirations) since 2020. Argued against it first, then realized I have no particular reason aside from habit to keep it that long. Sink. Scissors. Cheap barber, frustrated by the amount of remaining hair. Manual adjustments in the mirror afterwards. It does look better.
The prices were quite odd. A glass of draft beer cost more than a glass of wine. In stores, a cheap bottle of wine would cost 500 yen. (I tried one – for science, you understand – and aside from the plastic bottle and the plastic twist cap, it actually tasted better than some $12 wines I’ve had in Canada.) The absolute cheapest (and allegedly disgusting) medium-sized bottle of whiskey would cost 450 yen, or less than a McDonald’s snack. Remarkable.
I rode an intercity bus (3,000 yen), took a domestic flight (5,000 yen, but you spend lots of time and money taking the transit there and back), and the Shinkansen bullet train (a whopping 15,000 yen – but I had to do that at least once, to see what civilisation feels like).
The greater Tokyo area has 41 million people. You can fit every single Canadian here, eh. At times, it felt like the human version of an anthill.
There are no “third spaces” here. No benches to relax on. Relatively few parks. No tables or food courts at the big subway stations to enjoy your convenience store snack. (Though to be fair, some of those stores had designated sitting areas where you could eat and drink your purchases.) There is a phenomenon of “coffee refugees” – folks who would buy a coffee and then just… camp out. I could never spend more than 30 minutes at McDonald’s or such, but I saw the locals who would stream hour-long TV show episodes, one after another. That felt like a strange social compromise.
Japanese internet cafes are fascinating. You can rent a private room with a computer by the hour, by the day, by the week, by the month. Many do the latter, because that’s cheaper than renting an apartment, and you’d get free snacks, drinks, and showers. (And hey, a computer!) Apparently, when these businesses got shut down during the pandemic, thousands of Japanese people ended up homeless, and the whole country acted surprised. I made several visits – mostly to wrestle with a PC-only PDF file for the Canadian military’s writing contest. One visit was to reformat a video file for a small film festival. Cheap and excellent, would do so again.
The infamous capsule hotels were quite nice, actually – though their tiny lockers were designed for salarymen who missed their last subway train, not for tourists. Even with my height, there was plenty of space in the actual capsule. The blackout barrier curtain thingy worked too well: I would often wake up at 11am, thinking it was still early morning.
Outside Tokyo, I (personally and subjectively) found most towns to be too slow, too relaxed. What does that say about me?.. Kyoto came close: its party district was lively; its gigantic science museum was second to none. I once thought I might sign up to teach English in a small Japanese town for about a year. This visit has dissuaded me.
I visited a Japanese bathhouse four times: once, a famous traditional one in northern Tokyo. The other three times, at my strange hybrid hotel in Sendai, which combined posh amenities with a separate space for hostel-dwelling travelers. No showers here: just the public bath. Made sure to read up on all the etiquette beforehand. Didn’t start a riot, which is good. My utter lack of tattoos came in useful for once: tattoos here are associated with the yakuza, and thus aren’t welcome at public bathhouses. I may have stuck out like a sore thumb, but at least I belonged in that one respect.
My ever-restless brain came up with a viable plan to become a Tokyo salaryman, visa and all. But I would never fit in here. If I try very very hard, I might get accepted as a quasi-local in Quebec, especially in Montreal, but not here. Never here. And that is fine.
Bringing my tiny old 2015 Chromebook when I began this odyssey, more than four months ago, was unexpectedly wise. There are some things that a cellphone is incapable of, no matter how hard Google Docs may try.
The flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo took 12 hours and cost $238, because ZipAir would nickel-and-dime you for absolutely everything. I subsisted on a liter of airport water and a half-full bag of Doritos. The view from the window on the right was always blue. From the left, purple. I played Stardew Valley on my netbook and inspired at least one fellow passenger to do the same. Good game, eh. The flight from here to my next destination will be merely seven hours. From there to North America (eventually) will be merely 10. On some very small level, I feel cheated.
The five-yen coin is glorious, especially when it gets that extra brassy shine. I have an ongoing long-term art project: a medium-sized wooden chest filled with beautiful foreign coins. (Not necessarily exotic: the amber-coloured Canadian pennies are wonderful.) When I stepped into a rural bank and asked to buy a hundred 5-yen coins, that may have disrupted all of their established protocols. I waited 15 minutes and paid a 490-yen fee on top, but I did get my hundred coins. They will look glorious in their new home.
Vending machines. Vending machines everywhere. Overwhelming choice, with variable prices. Mostly coffee, some drinks, sometimes cake. Depending on the vendor’s desperation, you can find a machine that would sell a hot can of coffee (or soup!) for a mere hundred yen. And no, before you ask, there were no R-rated vending machines. My local friendos said that was just the one machine, in a single building, that besmirched Japan’s reputation that way.
There is an entire industry of capsule toys, with hundreds of those machines in long, long rows inside pachinko parlors.
The claw machines were rigged.
My writing and filmmaking sides are in a constant competition. No hardware to edit films here on my voyage, so I would spend empty evenings writing stories or hunting down ever-stranger and obscure submission calls. (Only the ones that pay, of course. I may be a degenerate, but even I have standards.) It is February 4th. Since January 1st, I’ve submitted 202 personalized letters to various editors and anthologies, accompanying my stories and the occasional poem. I’ve met some success. I have no clue what will come of my viral essay being longlisted for the prestigious BSFA awards, but it’s an honour.
I’m leaving much of Japan unexplored. A fairly small circuit: Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Sendai. (An unexpected gem of a town.) That’s largely due to the weather: my increasingly ragged red coat and Ecuadorian llama beanie keep me somewhat warm, but only somewhat, and even that is far from the coast. Some other time.
In approximately 38 days, barring any long-shot plans paying off, I will be sleeping in the desert, beneath the shiny stars, starting my second Pacific Crest Trail thruhike. High likelihood. We’ll see.
Sendai’s airport charges only 950 yen for a liter-sized mug of beer. Remarkable. Delicious.
The ticketing counter is yet another bureaucracy that breaks upon encountering me. They try – at first politely, then less so – to ascertain if I intend to stay in Thailand illegally, on account of my flying there with no return ticket of any kind. The conversation with the customs upon landing will be fun.
The lifesize Unicorn Gundam next to a big shopping mall in southeast Tokyo takes a while to get to, but it’s absolutely worth a trip. Intimidating, beautiful, fantastic.
I have bought a white horse at a temple. He is small and ceramic and beautiful and his name is Horatio.
Onward, then. Ever onward. To Thailand.
Grigory Lukin.com 