Tokyo: Passive-Aggressive
Nov 11, 2019
1898 words
~7 min
EN
Summer, 2019. I have a plan to make literary notes during my travel to Japan. My mind is still wandering around the form and the language, I’m overthinking the style, the tone, the plot. Then I feel a symptom of language disorientation, and difficulty to express myself in the way I want to.
I text my mother to say goodbye and my brother to inform him about all of my belongings. It really sounds like a death message rehearsal.
The flight attendant makes an announcement. She speaks in Malaysian. I laugh silently because it feels like someone is trying to whisper a cute version of my native language. I arrive at Kuala Lumpur around 9:30 PM, the airport is huge, my next flight to Tokyo is the following afternoon
I sit on a comfy chair between two escalators, eating a slice of bread and drinking a Goodday full cream milk I just bought from the WHSmith mini-mart. While looking around, I notice a traveler with a backpack carrying a banjo walking towards me and then sitting on a comfy chair nearby. Within a few minutes we engage in a conversation. My first impression suggests that he is from North America, but he actually comes from Norway. “Where are you heading?” I ask. “Bali,” he responds, “and you?” “Tokyo.” “Is this your first time to Bali?” “No, this is my second time, I just want to stay there longer this time.” I want to ask why he wanted to stay longer, but then I change my mind and ask something else instead.
If there is one thing that unites Asian people, it is probably their love for noodles. I come to WHSmith again, looking for breakfast. In the payment queue ahead of me, there are 6 Chinese grandmas holding instant noodles in the right hand and a Republic of China passport in the left hand. As they’re trying to pay, suddenly a few of them change their minds, in a flash move they swiftly go back to the food stacks and grab some more items.
An hour before departure, I recharge my phone in a spot near the gate entrance. There is a couple sitting in front of me and speaking in Indonesian with my hometown dialect. I have a feeling that I have seen them somewhere before. I steal glances, trying to remember their names, as I’m pretty sure that both of them were my seniors when I was in secondary school, but I’m not entirely convinced. After a while, I decide to ask them and within a moment we start talking about the past, my plans for Japan, and their honeymoon plan.
I sit beside the window near the front of the cabin. There is no one sitting beside me. During takeoff, the stewardess in front of me closes her eyes. She looks calm, but I can sense her anxiety. Just by looking at her face, you can’t really tell if she is Japanese; she could be someone from China, Korea, or Indonesia until you see her name tag filled with an obvious Japanese name.
From the airplane window, I see Tokyo covered by a sea of lights. It glows endlessly, shimmering like an ocean all the way to the horizon.
Haneda Airport, Tokyo, 10:40 PM. The longest flight and time differences I’ve experienced so far. A part of me is advanced in the past.
It’s almost midnight but the immigration line is still snaking. Some officers in front of the line are directing people to any available counter and warning us not to take pictures in this area. I watch the passports held by everyone. ‘Republica Italiana’, ‘Schweiz’, ‘Deutschland’, ‘United States of America’, Taiwan, India, South Africa, and from some of other countries. This crowd reminds me of a scene from the 2012 movie, where pairs of individuals from around the world are waiting to enter the giant ark in order to save themselves from the world apocalypse.
A customs officer performs her routine and stamps my passport, granting me freedom to explore Japan for the next 90 days. I grab my backpack, change my SIM card, and look for the Suica card machine (a daily commute card for JR train services) since I’m not going to use the Shinkansen to travel between cities. I take a JR service to Asakusa area. It’s so quiet on the train, there are only 3 people inside my carriage before it suddenly changes into a crowd of people right when I arrive at Akihabara for transit. From Asakusa, I continue walk to my hotel, making a stop at Lawson to buy a salmon onigiri, banana, and milk. I arrive at the hotel with no receptionist in front of the entrance, but they had previously emailed me to find an instruction paper in front of the lift if I arrived after midnight.
“How the hell does this work? What is this button?”, toilet in Japan is a magical seat, a truly stellar human achievement. Feeling a bit shy? Just press the noise button. Run out of tissue? No problem, there is a built-in fan for your butt. Don’t worry if you can’t locate the button, there is a braille guide on it. Sometimes there no English translation there, but you can always guess from the picture, right?
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher, once spoke in his Hermeneutics of Toilets about how the design of toilets in Germany, France, and England represent their underlying mechanisms of existential attitudes. In Germany, the toilet’s hole is placed at the front so you can sniff and inspect for traces of illness; which shows their reflective thoroughness or ‘conservatism’ in political terms. In France, it’s placed at the back so shit can vanish as quickly as possible; which shows their revolutionary hastiness. In England it’s placed in the middle and full of water, so the shit can be seen floating in it but partially observed; which shows their utilitarian pragmatism of ‘liberalism’. While in Japan as far as I can see it’s located slightly at the back like France. So what does it mean? Can we compare the famous French revolution to this Japan’s futuristic toilet with its ability to disguise poop’s noise, to play jingles, manuver water sprayer, and butt dryers? Isn’t it revolutionary?
Next to the toilet, there is a door leading to a semi-balcony and stairs to the rooftop of the building. I step outside, enjoying my onigiri and banana and look over the Sumida River. After a while, in a nearby apartment, I notice a woman with a towel hanging around her neck watering her plants. She looks as if she just come home from work. I can’t help watching her, suddenly she looks back at me, smiles, and nods her head then goes back inside. I’m still there, wondering why she was watering the plants at one in the morning.
It’s 8:14 AM, I go to the receptionist on the 9th floor to let them know my presence. The room is designed in a traditional Japanese house ambiance (ryokan); the tatami mats, the sliding shoji doors, a small table, a shoe area (genkan), and in contrast, an urban view from the window. The smells of coffee fills the room. I return to my room, grab my laptop, then back to enjoy the coffee while writing this note.
When I was in Kuala Lumpur I had done some research about the places I wanted to visit in Japan. Some hidden places with fewer tourists, natural places where I could go for a little hike, spots mentioned in Murakami’s novels, and parts of the city where I will let myself get lost without having any destination to visit. I pinpointed all these places on Google Maps. Perhaps it would be more interesting if I do this without using Google Maps at all, which means I might interact with people more often, get lost and spend more time in my confusion more often, and accidentally come across unusual places more often.
I left the hotel around 2 PM and made a stop at the nearest 7-Eleven. I grab a salmon scrambled eggs onigiri and a bottle of berry smoothie before continuing my walk to Akihabara, about 2 km from my place. I spent the first two hours looking for a secondhand Nintendo 3DS for a friend back in Jakarta.
As I hopped from one store to another like a frog, at one intersection I stop for a moment when I notice a red building with a big SEGA word upon it. All of a sudden a flood of involuntary memories comes to me. It brings me back to the day when my mother just got back from work and surprised me with a purple-pink SEGA video game console. I vaguely remember that, my grandma was sitting behind me and watching me play. If I fast forward to my secondary school years, I can picture myself sitting at the corner of my school library during break, indulged myself with mostly Japanese comics. It’s fascinating how these memories resurfaced after so many years.
A few blocks behind the toy stores I get stopped by a woman wearing an anime cosplay. This isn’t the first time I’ve been approached by a cosplaying woman since I entered this area. The previous woman offered me food, and this one is offering companionship to a hookah bar. I tell her that I can’t speak Japanese, but she replies with “I can speak English” while following me slowly. I ask her what’s that about, and she explains to me about the hookah. I say that I don’t smoke then she stops following me.
The crows are everywhere, they make loud raspy voices while perching on electric cables, accurately depicting scenes I’ve seen in Japanese comics. I walk straight to the north, to Ueno Park and sit on a bench in front of the lake. I notice a young couple not far away. I steal glances a few times. The man looks so clumsy and sits in a very stiff manner. Behind me, near the wall, there is a homeless person staring at the lake, most of them are elderly. In the distance I can clearly see half of Tokyo Skytree.
Not far from Tokyo University, I see a long queue in front of a place named Tokyo Light Blue Hongo-3. The water vapor emanating from the shop catches my attention. They write the shop’s name and the open sign in English but the menu they put in front of the door is completely in Japanese. From the outside, I can peek at a row of people standing and slurping noodles. Right behind me in the queue is a woman who is probably a university student. It looks like her consciousness is traveling somewhere. I dare myself to ask in simple Japanese if she can speak English. “Eigo ga hanasemasu ka?” She nods. I ask what do they have inside. “It’s soba udon,” she replies and thinks for a while. “Where are you from?”,“Can you guess?”, “Spain or Italy?“. The conversation is interrupted and we should get inside. I’m completely puzzled because the menu on the machine filled with buttons labeled in Japanese. She kindly helps me to translate and I decide to order the wakame (seaweed) soba udon. Everyone is slurping here as if it were an eating competition.