culturalsavvy.com | Oridinary in Tokyo

Ordinary in Tokyo
By Keyvan Tabari

Sightseeing

The tour guide took us straight to a jade “museum” shop as our first stop. This brazen act of marketing was then followed by a mere drive through the sights which were promised on the tour brochure; we did not even pause. Through the windows of the bus, the landscape of Tokyo appeared as a hodgepodge of post World War Two buildings, injected with such oddities as a fake Eiffel Tower. We stopped at the portal of the mall leading to the Senso-ji (also known as Asakusa Kannon Temple) temple. After some disjointed comments about the temple in the distance, the guide left us to our own devices for the next forty-five minutes. I saw foreign visitors mimicking the locals, fanning themselves with the smoke that rose from a small well of burning incense in front of the temple. I imagined the ritual was bereft of any spiritual meaning for them. On the other side of Senso-ji, two young Japanese women were being pulled in a tourist rickshaw by a handsome hulk whose animated talking I wished our guide could match. When the latter collected us, we only got some more driving with her through the traffic of Tokyo. I asked to be dropped off in Akihabara, the famed high-tech district of the city, as I wished to experience riding the Tokyo Subway afterward. She pointed out the direction to the subway station.

Such general directions, however, proved totally inadequate for me. This major station which served several suburban trains as well as subway lines was being renovated. Finding the entry platform to the line I had to take was virtually impossible for a person who did not read Japanese. I asked several people for help. Every one of them stopped to listen to my pleading, although very few could speak English. Finally, a middle-aged man came to my rescue. He lived in Tokyo, but as a manager for the Philips corporation he frequently visited Europe . The signs for the station were not clear and he spent nearly half an hour walking around with me. He talked to a station agent and a shopkeeper before we found the entry to the right platform. In the process I told him about my tour guide. He grimaced knowingly, “Unfortunately, we Japanese don’t know how to communicate with foreigners. We have been an island nation and self-contained for too long.” This made sense to me. It was not that I had been ignored; I was just not treated as special. Japanese did not make much fuss about foreign tourists. The presence of foreigners was accepted in a matter of fact way. It did not impact their life one way or another. In that ultimate sense, Tokyo seemed self-sufficient.

Tokyo’s subway, like its streets, was quite and clean. I saw no beggar, homeless, or hustler. There was no paper debris, no discarded newspapers even in the garbage bins. In the subway cars nobody read. There was no conversation. The younger passengers were glued to their hand-held devices. They were not listening, talking, or moving their fingers. They were just stirring at the silent screen.

I stepped out into the drizzle that helps keep Tokyo ’s parks green. This was a good time to visit the lush grounds of the Imperial Palace . The many taxis that passed were full. The fare is expensive. Only a large middle class could support such traffic. At the entrance to an office building I noticed rows of parked umbrellas. People who came out would take them into the rain and those who entered the building would leave theirs in the pile. Somebody said I could use one too. There was no guard around. Public order required no visible guardian in Tokyo .

"The Imperial Palace is the biggest piece of property in Tokyo, but it is only for two persons in this very crowded city,” a critical European had told me that morning. Now I stood with four Japanese tourists, looking at the royal residence across the moat that separated us. Located in downtown Tokyo, it was accessible yet distant as we could not enter it. It retained the requisite mystique.

I circled the Palace on the outside and passed the neighboring Japanese Supreme Court building on the way to Tokyo ’s main Shinto shrine, Yasukuni -jinja (shrine). The Japanese Prime Minister’s visits to this shrine have been called unconstitutional because it contains the remains of certain “war criminals,” so determined by American victors after World War Two. I went through its steel gates and saw a group of pilgrims posing for a picture.

They had brought their own photographer who stood on a stool. I asked the custodian of the shrine for permission to take a picture. He came around and took my picture with the shrine in the background. Then he posed for me with a smile.

Allure of the Foreign

Tokyo was not immune to the influence of foreigners. There were enough of them here to have their own upscale supermarket, Kinokuiya. Here I joined a group of expatriate and Japanese shoppers who were listening to a salesclerk describe the newly-arrived Napa Valley wines. She reminded us, anecdotally, that in the boom days of the 1980s, the very first batch of the new Beaujolais from France would arrive here for Japanese consumption, in chartered Concorde planes.

The expatriates in Tokyo also have their own newspapers. On the front page of the September 10, 2005 issue of that paper, Metropolis, was the news that the Japanese automaker Lexus planned to introduce its luxury models to the Japanese market this year. Some Japanese analysts were apprehensive, the report said, because Lexus lacked the “allure” of foreign products. On the fashionable auto row of Aoyama-dori I saw on display, in the windows of chic stores, a Maserati priced at $139,000, a Bentley priced at $214,000, and a Peugeot priced at $312,000. No domestic car was on display. Across the street, Epson, a furniture store, exhorted its customers by a banner in English: “Exceed your Vision!”

Tokyo attracts Americans, judging by the large number of them I saw in my hotel. Not all of them were there for business. In the elevator that took me to the lobby, a cheerful woman said hello to me. She proceeded to tell me that this was her wedding day. Both she and the groom lived in San Francisco but had decided to get married in Tokyo because “it would be fun.” When we discovered that we were practically neighbors in our mutual hometown in the States, she said “Hey, why don’t you join the party?”

Later that day I ran into another wedding party from the U.S. There was no special explanation for this coincidence, the cousin of this bride assured me. Indeed, I detected no abundance of aphrodisiac in Tokyo. The parks were lovely but empty of demonstrative lovers. On a holiday, the Autumnal Equinox, I saw many school girls in uniform. If there were any flirting Japanese women, I missed them.

The Americans were boisterous, but silent when it came to speaking Japanese. This inability to interact in a foreign language, born out of geographic insularity, seemed accentuated in the more homogenous Japanese who unlike the Americans have not allowed in immigrants from other lands.

In the crowds that filled Shinjuku-dori and Omote Sando, I looked in vain for the multi ethnic collage of faces so common in America ’s big cities. I only saw cos-play (costume play) -zoku (group) girls wearing far out Western clothes to mock onlookers as much as themselves.

Biographical Note: Keyvan Tabari is an international lawyer in San Francisco . He holds a PhD and a JD, and has taught at Colby College, the University of Colorado, and the University of Tehran .

Address: ktabari@sbcglobal.net

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