Tokyo Turbocharge

7. Mr Uematsu and Mr Ron Fast

2005-03-18T17:44:00.000-08:00

Mr Uematsu was an awkward sorta guy who was about 45, whose jet black hair was starting to thin, and who wore god awful glasses with lenses that were almost as big as his cheeks. I met him in the foyer of the Keio Plaza as he stepped forward and reached for my hand after we were introduced by one of The Programme organisers. He had come down from wherever it was I was going to live to collect me. It was an awkward introduction, with hands being offered for shaking but the shake being too limp for me, too firm for him. I tried to make eye contact, as is customary during a handshake, but he bowed his head away from my gaze. Guessing that maybe I should bow too, I nodded my head with a nervous caution that made my effort laughable by native standards. The Programme had primed us with a few basic Japanese greetings, and I was prompted to make an effort by his use of a Japanese 'how do you do'. Of course I completely fluffed up my reciprocal 'dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu', mainly due to a lack of attention during the language briefing, but not helped by a jet-laggy hangover. 'Daniel-san', he said to me, sucking his teeth in the way that Japanese men do when they are being highly polite, 'this is Mr Ron Fast'. I looked to my left at the tall slender Canadian guy who had been waiting at the side. Things picked up a bit as Ron shook my hand in the correct manly eye-contacting way, avoiding the text-book English greetings and asking me more spontaneous questions, 'How was your journey?'.

We must have stood around talking for about five more minutes before Mr Uematsu prompted us to pick up the luggage to go and catch the train. With my one hundred or something kilos of snowboard and tent and CDs and clothes strewn one bag or case each between us, we three strolled out of the Keio Plaza into the humid air and along the shiny pavements, our bodies absorbing the heat and our shirts sticking to our backs. It wasn't much more than one hundred metres before Mr Uematsu decided that we should stop in a coffee shop. This one was of the Doutor chain, a small little place stuck on the bottom floor of a twenty story building covered from top to toe in grey tiles and neon signs. As we entered the air conditioned atmosphere hit me smack between the eyes at the same time a chorus of 'irashaimasayyyyyy' hit me between the ears, the waiting and counter staff crying out welcome. As we sat down a girl dressed in a tidily pressed uniform with a knee length skirt and a brown and yellow shirt of the corporate colours came across with a tray to serve us each small glass of water and a hot steaming hand towel. It might have been meant for my hands but that thing went straight across my sweaty brow, attracting what I noticed was a slight look of surprise from Mr Uematsu. Wiping one's face was obviously not the done thing. We chatted as Mr Uematsu ordered three ice coffees, or aisu kohi as they are better known over there and, seeing I was hot, handed me a plastic and paper fan that I thought was a gift but which I later found out was a form of free advertising he had been handed on the street. The polite chat continued with stuff he had obviously and surprisingly read in my long forgotten application. With my own questions I found out that Ron had been there a month already, that he was 30, had worked in Korea as an English teacher before, and wanted to save money before starting a post-grad programme back in Canada. I also gleaned that we both had quite luxurious one bedroom appartments already lined up and supplied at a nicely subsidised rent.

6. Arrival Briefing

2005-02-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

To a graduate fresh out of university, having spent the last five years in beery poverty, the experience of a free business class flight to Japan was as luxurious as being bathed in milk by twelve naked maidens. Stepping out of the bus to place my feet on the spotless pavements below Shinjuku's dramatic vista and wandering into the sumptuous five star halls of the fourty seven floor Keio Plaza Hotel, I felt like a complete fraud. I was just a twenty three year old working class kid who'd blagged a free ride to Japan and ended up in a room with gold plated taps and a free sewing kit, sitting high up in a skyscraper looking out across the chasm of roadway to a bewildering mess of city. I was so excited that I rapidly set to work stealing as many souvenirs as possible, including a varnished oak Keio Plaza clothes hanger that forever forced my flimsy blue plastic one out of the suit holding business.

Us Brits weren't the only people arriving for the briefing, or the 'Tokyo Orientation' as it was termed by The Programme. There were also people from Australia, America, Canada, even a smattering of continental Europeans. We had two nights and a day to spend in the hotel together. Our schedule was filled with welcome addresses and lectures by keynote speakers, basic Japanese lessons and buffet meals and imbetween all that, some free time to sneak out onto the humid streets of Shinjuku to get our first real taste of things. Being a Japanese government initiative, The JET Programme had pulled out all the stops in their efforts to impress us with the grandeur of Japan. I can see now looking back that these early moments of my experience in Japan were constructed by the JET organisers to communicate something to us. With the locations they chose, with the luxury they lavished upon us as their guests, with the status and credibility of the speakers we listened to during the briefing, Japan was consciously and deliberately showing itself to us. By choosing these particular images, it was displaying all of its wealth, international status and modernity: the vital aspects of its national identity.

Imagine if your country, whilst in a state of isolated Feudalism, had been forced at the point of American gunships to open itself up to the outside world. Well this is the story of Japan, and the background to the drama into which I had plunged myself with that fateful choice back in summery London.

It was 1853 when the Americans sailed up into Tokyo bay in their four black ships, loaded with 61 cannon and typical Western hubris about showing backward nations the meaning of enlightenment. Japan had been in self isolation for the previous 200 years, fiercely limiting its exposure to a dribble of goods and people, and a stream of information. Although cut-off from it, the Japanese were not uninterested by the state of the world and had been busy learning a significant amount about the state of our nations, their political structures and legal systems, militaries, economies, and our systems of thought. With the arrival of the American gunships, they recognised how backward and militarily weak they had become in comparison to the West. At this point the Japanese military elite, the Shoguns and Samurais who ruled the country, factionalised into those who wanted to progress their nation by adopting new ideas and technology, and those who wanted to preserve the status quo by killing any Westerner who set foot on their volcanic island shores. It wasn't until 1889 that a constitutionalised Japan came into existence, singing the tune of national propaganda with phrases such as 'Rich Country, Strong Army'. With this step, Japan embarked onto a new path in its relationship with the rest of the world. It was a unique step, one which made Japan the only country in the history of Western colonial expansion that prevented itself being turned into a remotely governed outpost. It was a step which immediately threw Japan into competition with the Western powers, and not just competition for materials, but competition for status.

To a people still thinking within a fuedal system of thought that stratified Japanese society into a vertical hierarchy of identities including peasant, farmer, artisan, merchant, priest and warrior, the world appeared as comprising of hierarchical layers of nations. Japan saw that it had some climbing to do if it was to be further up the scale and a peer to the advanced Westerners. Since we were all playing the game of imperialism at the time, it joined in. It transformed itself into an imperial power by systematically importing Western technology and manufacturing, and grafting them onto their own talented indigenous craft industry. Japan was so successful that by 1942 it had managed to secure almost all of South-East Asia, including Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, a significantly sizeable chunk of Eastern China, and undivided Korea. However, intoxicated with a fervently overconfident nationalism built on a politics of mystical dogma, Japanese ambitions had dealt themselves a killer blow by attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor one year earlier. Being an island nation with very few natural resources, it was always going to be difficult to beat the American behemoth and its allies. Nevertheless, Japan battled on for another four years until Hiroshima was struck by the Atom Bomb, killing over one hundred thousand men, women and children in a single violent flash. By the time Nagasaki had been similarly destroyed three days later, the God Emperor and his cabinet were ready to accept the Allied terms: complete surrender followed by an allied occupation and the creation of a democratic state. The Americans moved in under General MacArthur, determined to overhaul the Japanese mind and its culture as much as the organs of its state and economy. Seven years later, the country was left transformed into a pacifist constitional monarchy, with reformed industry and unions, an overhauled education system, and with a number of military bases remaining under American possession.

After the war, the game of imperialism was more or less over, and trade and economy became the playing field upon which nations measured themselves against each other. With its completely modernised state, without the need to pay for national defence, and with an empoverished people ambitious to recover the face they had lost through the shame of fighting on the losing side of the war, Japan had everything in place to promote its economic expansion. The Olympics were held in Tokyo in 1964, with visitors from all across the world experiencing a new modernity and efficiency, symbolised not least by the hi-tech prowess of the 125 mph Shinkansen Bullet Trains. By 1968 the Japanese had succeeded in growing their economy to become the second largest in the world, behind only the US. If Europeans had ever been relevant to the Japanese they certainly became less so now, being lower down the hierarchy of nations as measured by GDP. As far as it was concerned, Japan had arrived, was our peer or superior, and it intended us to know it. During the '80s when their economy was riding a bubble of false expansion and arming itself with a fistful of dollars won through exporting, corporate Japan toured the West on a shopping spree. They kept themselves busy buying up icons of Western culture like the Rockefeller Centre in New York and paintings by celebrity artists like Picasso, Van Gogh or Monet. None of these purchases were made because of their investment potential. They were made for the purpose of ostentatiously showing Japanese wealth to the world and to themselves. To them, the possession of our icons was a way to communicate something to the world about their new position in the international status rankings.

And there it was, the thing that I had fallen into by changing culture - a vibrant and dynamic paranoia about national and personal status. I didn't know it, but I had suddenly changed my own status from that of Human Being to that of Status Symbol. Under those circumstances, the next two years were always going to be a challenge. But for the time being, I just wanted to know which particular part of Japan I was going to be living in.

5. Up to Shinjuku

2005-02-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

By the time we had finished our cigarettes and headed back indoors, the throng of JET participants and organisers was looking ready to move on out. An enthusiastic American girl was waving a flag beckoning us to follow her past the crowds, so we rejoined our trolleys and starting pushing back out into the stifling humidity. Being in the majority British, we all made a neat and orderly queue at the coach as the suited driver and his assistant franticly arranged all our cases into neat rows inside the coach's cavernous hold, occasionally wiping the beaded sweat of their foreheads with white handkerchiefs.

Inside the coach were the same ridiculous lace curtains we had seen when smoking. A huddle of us soon started talking, leaning across the backs of our chairs, cracking jokes. It was the usual talk you get on these occasions, "Where are you from?", "Where are you going?", "Oh! You've been to Japan before. So what's it like?". Fatigue and the motion of the bus made such pleasantries a strain, and before long I was gazing out the tinted window at the view clutching at my senses, searching for my own visual answers to the mysterious place I had just arrived in. The grey modernity of Narita airport was soon left behind as we drove past the hotels and onto the motorway, competing for road space with exotic Nissans and Hondas. The land opened up around us until my eyes fell upon a scene of watery squares dotted on the inside with green and growing clumps of rice, and bounded with raised lines of earth criss-crossing themselves perpendicular and reaching out to the parking lots of blue roofed houses and the walls of two-storey white tiled appartment blocks.

Swimming under the weight of fatigue, I shut my eyes for what felt like a moment but opened then again to find that the open land had suddenly been closed in up into a visual mess the like of which I had never, ever, seen before. The highway has raised itself up above the ground level and I was looking down and out and up and yet all I could see was buildings. Some were tall and and some were short but they were all decorated in brilliant Japanese and colour against plain facade. As the coach slowed in the traffic I glanced up between two buildings stretching thirty metres above me but squashed together only two metres apart, their windows facing into each other into the shade of their mutual shadow. Although clean, the view was far from tidy and neat. Telephone lines and power cables were draped dangling ramshackle and running off to the buildings. And the buildings themselves were arranged onto the Tokyo urban landscape with the planned consistency of a box full of a million multi-sized lego bricks dropped in one random act of fate from above.

A little bit further and we took a gradient off to the left, descending down an incline until we found ourselves on the ground with the highway twenty metres above us, suspended on colossal y-shaped posts standing firm in the tarmac. Down at street level the road was lined with ribbons of pavement, and railings with bike upon bike perched against them bearing granny baskets on their handle bars, and shops with their store fronts lit up in flashing neon under the darkness of the shielded sun. We turned left away from the highway's shadow and the sky opened up around us to reveal that we were hundreds of metres deep in a sea of skyscrapers, moving slowly at the bottom of a wide plateau of black road divided in the middle by a thin mohican stripe of green lawn and lampposts. I didn't know it yet but this was Shinjuku, one of the throbbing hearts of the city, pumping out electronic noise and light from it's shops selling all the latest cameras and and mobiles amongst its narrow back streets, processing three quarters of a million passengers every day through its station. The paths of this town were going to be trodden raw by my feet over the next two years, a small fortune spent in the station and the restaurants and the clubs and bars. But at that first encounter seen from the coach window just above the tidy pavement but way way below the shining dagger peaks, I was headed with the other fourty recruits to the Keio-Plaza Intercontinental Hotel for my one-day arrival briefing.

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4. Narita

2005-01-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

Looking down from the top of the stairs with my passport in my hand, my mind was sensually assaulted with the shapes and sounds of a world awesomely foreign to the patterns of life burnt stale between my ears. To be sure, all the familiar objects you would expect were arranged about me, signs and parallel lines of u-shaped baggage claim belts, people with arms and legs milling about purposefully, carts being pushed and suitcases dragged, announcements made, customs officials inspecting and surveying. But it was not in these generalities of the scene that my senses were tweaked and teased, it was in the details.

The air held an air-conditioned chill, and a scent that was moist and subtly salty inside my nose. The sparkling surfaces of stainless steel greeted me, with rubber belts bearing the loaded luggage without sign of complaint, whirring in a silent purr of engineered perfection. Grey rectangles suspended from the ceiling held signs for our information, flashing nimble rows of electronic green and red dots which formed lines and strokes and curled corners, a language assembled in an intricacy my mind was not prepared to recognise. In a sea of heads we all stood out as sharply as flickering candles against the crowded darkness of jet black hair. Our height and our clothes, the volume of our voices, the way we were standing as we waited to pull our cases from the carousel and the way we walked out through customs, all these things were in contrast, all were strange. But of course, it was not us who were strange to our senses. In our bubbles of perception shaped by the UK over our lifetimes, it was what we were seeing that we categorised as strange as our vivid eyes darted from shape to shape.

We passed through into the arrivals hall with our trolleys loaded and wilful. The volume of our sensual confusion increased against the background of faces and shops and words read and spoken which rendered our language useless and our biology unnervingly distinct. We were immediately approached by a small collection of Westerners and Japanese holding signs for The JET Programme, marshalling us into an orderly huddle away from the path of others pushing their way out from customs. As we waited around for everyone to be organised, Dave and I and one girl from our gang of four smokers discussed sneaking off to have our first cigarette on Japanese tarmac. Spying some tinted doors leading out onto the taxi and bus stands, we headed over and the doors parted automatically although a little later than we expected, making us stop awkwardly in front of them. When they opened again our jet-lagged and already grimy bodies were enveloped in a hot mist of August humidity. It licked our faces as we stepped outside, and snuck under our shirts to sit in our armpits and lie across our backs in thin sweaty pools. I pulled out my packet of Marlboro Lights as Dave offered me match, gleaned from some London pub and now sharing our voyage.

"Fuckin' hell, it's hot", I said.

"God yeah, it's 'orrible. And this jet-lag's killin' me".

He was right, Dave. The three of us really looked like death warmed up and given a bad hair cut, standing there sharing the humidity with the exhaust fumes of buses and cars.

"It's pretty weird innit? I mean all the signs and stuff. And look at those buses". Karen looked across to the roadway, taking a quick drag and then exhaling. "They've got lace curtains!"

"Oh yeah! Weird. What's that all about?!", I replied, "And they're all short and stumpy and stuff". They certainly were a different shape from any coach or bus you might have seen in London.

"Look at those taxis", Dave said, pointing a little further down from where we were, "The drivers are all wearing white gloves. Every one of them. And they're all wearing the same suit".

We stood there smoking, gazing about in our surreal state with hearts pumping blood around our veins, carrying nicotine and Japanese air to our organs and tissues. Our bodies absorbed and our minds reacted to Japan with every breath, every photon of light and every note of noise, whether an electronic chime or a child's voice we didn't understand. The unknown had started to flow unstoppably into us. Whatever adventure we had lined ourselves up for had begun.

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3. Ohayo Nihon

2005-01-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

Back in '98, JAL business class passengers had a choice of sitting in a smoking or a non-smoking seat. I chose smoking. Sitting in that tube with a bunch of chain-smoking noodle-slurping Japanese business men for 12 tedious hours turned out to be a bit of a stomach churner, but it's true what they say about smokers being sociable. About 40 of us were shipped out to Narita that evening but by the end of the flight it was a hardcore gang of four stained-nail Brits that had made the most progress in alleviating boredom and nerves. Dave and I had The Programme sussed out from the start. Our cynicism towards it began after our interviews when we were only selected to be in the list of reserve candidates. As 'reserves' we had automatically been categorised as losers of some sort, so we were of the mind to just exploit The Programme for all the money and travel experience we could get. Dave had been a TEFL teacher before in Italy and Spain, so we shared some passion for submersion in cultures abroad. We thought this passion was going to be of help, but as it turned out, it was going to be the death of us.

We got our first taste of what was in store when we stepped out of that plane and headed out into Immigration. A vast hall was laid out before us in various shades of metal grey and white, the floor covered with a hard-wearing plastic surface cleaned endlessly spotless by a man, the colour of whose dark combed hair matched the blotches splattered like flicked paint across one of his cheeks. He was armed with a shiny wheeled trolley holding mops, buckets, brushes and a bin, and dressed in a pea-green shirt & white trouser combo that had creases ironed so sharp they could have cut diamonds. The atmosphere of the hall demanded a hushed reverence, and amongst the gleaming surfaces our jet-lagged bodies were a contrasting scruffiness. The ceilings hung low over our heads, shining their strip-lights down on us brightly as we stood in the queue waiting in line to present our visas and passports to the uniformed officials.

My line was one of eight queues arranged in parallel along the long and narrow hall. I stepped over the line segregating the previous passenger from myself and approached the solemn looking Japanese who was going to admit me to his country. I said hello and smiled, slightly embarrassed not to know a single appropriate word to use. He looked back at me seriously from his enclosure behind a sheet of low glass and reached for my passport, a rectangle of red and gold in my hands.

"Instructor for one year", the Japanese guy said.

"Yes. One year visa."

I just kept my mouth shut after that and let him get on with his hectic page flicking, picking up, pressing and then putting down of a collection of various plastic rubber stamps. He gave me back my freshly processed passport and said "thankyou". Again I smiled lamely, then walked past his booth and down onto a flight of stairs to descend to baggage reclaim.

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2. Goodbye UK

2005-01-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

Previous Part

My ride to Heathrow airport on the 18th August was in the back of the 'Ford Fiesta Beige' - Nick's old beaten up banger. We drove across town from Clapham, past the trendy residents sunning themselves brown on the turf of the Common, or chilling with a pint of beer on benches outside the pubs whilst black cabs and routemasters pumped out street grime. The summer's national football anthem 'Vindaloo' was still on the radio, even though we had watched England go out in the second round in a 2 all draw to Argentina, followed by the national ignominy of the French thrashing Brazil 3-0 to win the World Cup.

Whether the check-in scales were broken before I put my bags on them I don't know, but it was just as well they didn't register any weight. A giant suitcase stuffed with clothes and CDs and books and a three-man tent, a 60 litre rucksack and then a 5ft long bag holding my complete snowboarding kit meant that I would have been more than a little over my luggage allowance. The lady at the counter gave me a wink as we joked cheerfully about my good luck and then handed me my business class boarding class, freely supplied by the Japanese Government.

Nick and I went upstairs to the Terminal 3 shops, and weaving between the crowds of all races and colours, ended up sitting in a gruesome pastiche of a pub constructed in the corner of the building overlooking the gates and the planes. A couple of weeks earlier a friend had asked me if I was nervous about leaving and I looked at her with a blank expression on my face. I wasn't at all nervous at the moment she asked me that question. As far I was concerned I was off on a gigantic adventure and there was not a single sinister gremlin whispering sticky doubts into the space between my ears. But that final afternoon after a final morning of final phone calls to my family and to Nicola, my nerves had started to crack like a sheet of overloaded ice, revealing underneath them a black black pool of the utterly unknown and terrifying.

To say I didn't know anything about life in Japan at that point isn't entirely true. I did know how to count from one to five, ichi ni san yon go, and I was aware that I would have to wear slippers a lot, so I'd packed a couple of pairs of flip flops to cover that little culture quirk. At the Programme's Pre-Departure Orientation three weeks earlier I had received the theoretical knowledge that I would greet people by bowing, and without eye contact. And I had received a contract from some place called Yono city in Saitama Prefecture giving me all the fleshy terms, in Japanese. I was able to figure out that Saitama Prefecture was basically northern Tokyo, although all my efforts to locate Yono-city on the map were frustrated. So as I waved goodbye to my oldest friend and boarded the JAL 747, I actually didn't know where in Japan I would be living. More than that though, I didn't know anybody. Literally not a single person.

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1. Summer 98

2005-01-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

What happens to a human being when he is without the life-support of his culture? Who does he become? Can you distill the fundamental essence of a person by stripping away the layers of perception and understanding in which he grew up? These are big questions, and there's no theoretical solution. So when I was 23 and reckless with myself, I went to Japan to submit to practical answers.

The summer of 1998 was good by English standards. The bright days elongated into an endless dazzle, the sun beaming its warm rays across the abundant green hills of the South East. On university campus us final years revelled in our completed degrees, drinking beers, flinging frisbees and shooting supersoakers under the infinite blue of our late-setting North Atlantic sky.

I felt like a shooting star that summer, blazing across the face of my culture, holding a searing passion and stunning success. And looking into Nicola's eyes, something had lifted deep inside my psyche, as if the landscape of my soul had been illuminated by a new light. Moving to London with Super Discount on my play list, it seemed that nothing could stop me. I was throbbing with cultural integration, with circles of friends expanding in number, size and intimacy, and job offers landing on my doorstep at the rate of one a week.

It was during those hot hectic weeks packed with tube riding and Bengy's breakfasts, sitting behind my desk in an open-plan office off Oxford Street, that I got the phone call from the Japan Exchange & Teaching Programme. I never wanted to be an English teacher. I was ambitious to be the Engineer I'd always been training and studying to become. But my curious mind had been teased by 12 perspective bending months in Toulouse a year earlier and I was itching to see beyond Europe's confine, yearning to stretch myself to the limit of the cultural frontier. Given the choice I had between adjusting to the North of England or adjusting to Japan, I took the easy option.

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