The oddities I incur in Tokyo

            Every time in I have been in Tokyo I have had some incredibly bizarre experiences, stuff that just doesn’t seem normal.  Then again, in one of the worlds largest metropolitan areas, that might just be expected.  Especially one that is so incredibly homogeneous and the fact that I tend to attract strangeness.

            I can start with my first trip for my first example.  Here I am, not even officially a high school graduate yet.  Just getting off of the train after a 2 hour ride from the airport, having been on a plane for 12 hours and awake for close to 24, I was in the northeastern portion of Tokyo called Edogawa-ku, more precisely the neighborhood of Koiwa.  I am trying to find the youth hostel I am spending the next night in.  Long story short, I was lost, largely due to Japans asinine address system.  In a fruitless struggle to find the place I have been pacing up and down one block for a while now.  I stick out like a sore thumb.  I am clothed in baggy skater pants, a non-descript t-shirt and skateboard shoes.  I have a large chain wallet, a military gunny sack and a backpack.  After the Nth pace up the street a nice, new Mercedes sedan pulls up and stops.  Oh yeah, here we go, time for trouble.  The largest Japanese guy I have ever seen gets out of the car, dressed in a suit and comes up to me.  In decent English he asks me if I’m lost.  With an incredible sigh of relief I tell him yes, and hand him the address I have, telling him I am trying to find this place, this is where I am staying.  He tells me he doesn’t know the area but he has a friend near by who does and we will ride in his car to go ask them for help.  I happily agree to go with him and suppress an incredible urge to shout out shotgun.  Not only is this my first time in a Mercedes, it is also my first time in a car that has the driver side on the right.  It only took me a split second to realize which side of the car to get in on, no culture shock at all here.  We drive off and he starts talking to me, his accent is a bit thick at parts and I have to ask him to repeat himself.  The thing I remember the most about the conversation is him asking me what kind of music I listen to, he said he loved American rock, like Aerosmith, I smiled and nodded, even though I'm not a fan.  We drive around, I become aware that I probably don’t smell the best, having been awake and on a plane for a long time and what not.  We stop out front of a mom and pop clinic.  He tells me to wait inside while he talks with his friend.  I look into the building through the glass windows.  An old woman and a young woman greet him excitedly.  He talks to them and points out to me.  The look out at me smiling large and waving and bowing.  I return their enthusiasm.  A few minutes later he returns to the car.  We both wave good-bye to his friends at the clinic and he says he knows where to go.  I was close to the place when he picked me up.  He quickly drops me off, a block away from where he picked me up.  I thank him from the bottom of my soul and he drives off.  I wish I could remember his name.  In retrospect this guy smelled incredibly of being Yakuza…the thought never crossed my mind until many years later, all I remember was this man, who was bigger than I was, dressed in a suit with a very nice luxury car had given me a ride to find my room for the night, which ended up being a block away from where he picked me up.

            The second bizarre experience fits that it was during my second trip.  Before the trip I had begun talking with a guy who was in Tokyo over the internet.  We set up a time to get together and hang out in Tokyo.  The man’s name was Ehsan and he was a Bangladeshi national going to school in Tokyo for an engineering degree.  My friend Randy and I went to meet Ehsan at Shibuya train station on a Saturday afternoon; he was taking us to his favorite restaurant in town.  The fact that Randy is 6’7” and I am 6’2” and Ehsan is about 5’ even isn’t the strange part of this story…no the part that hit me was us in the restaurant.  Here we are, two Americans, in Tokyo, eating all you can eat Indian curry at an Indian restaurant with a Bangladeshi expatriate listening to Christmas music.  The curry was awesome and Ehsan sat in amazement as the both of us shoved down plate full’s of it.  That was some of the best curry I have had in my entire life, but I will never be able to find that restaurant ever again.

            Another bizarre incident stems from my second trip as well.  Randy and I were wandering around Kabuki-cho one night when two things happened.  Kabuki-cho is the red light district in Tokyo.  It’s just west of Shinjuku, which is one of the more high end area of the metropolis.  Now we were not in Kabuki-cho to get laid, I wanted to show randy what the place was like at night.  The first thing that happened was that I came to the realization that the Japanese perception of sexuality in regards to morality is far different from Americans.  It is not uncommon to see families strolling through the red light district at 9 at night, with small children in tow.  This even wasn’t that shocking, or bizarre in any sense of the word, what happened afterwards was though.  In Kabuki-cho all of the hostess clubs, strip joints and message parlors will have hawkers with placards and flyers outside, trying to drum up business.  In Japan firearms are illegal, very few cops carry guns.  As we where making are way through the maze of the district we stumbled upon two revolver toting police officers trying to drag away a man who apparently was illicitly hawking.  I wasn’t sure why they were dragging him in and everyone else seemed to not pay attention.  For a second when it started the other hawkers stopped to see what was going on then hurriedly went back to their jobs, if rather nervously, once they realized what was going on.  The man was dressed in a long winter coat and was trying to do what ever it took to not be dragged away by the cops short of letting go of the sign or fighting back.  The officers did not have their guns out at the time but as we watched them my eyes quickly shot to the holstered weapons on their belts.  After I returned to the states I asked my Japanese teacher at the time what would facilitate a cop carrying a firearm in Japan.  She told me they only have guns for ceremonial purposes…right.  I left it at that.

            During my third trip I went with a number of people.  Our first night there my friends wanted to see some excitement, we decided to go to Roppongi; a place I had never previously been to in Tokyo.  Now up until this point my experiences in Tokyo have been incredibly positive.  There has been no where in the city that I have never felt 100% safe, and I've been to Kabuki-cho, one of the yakuza’s main stomping grounds.  We took the subway to Roppongi station and got out at the main intersection of the area, the hotspot, Roppongi Crossings.  The first thing my eyes went to was a bald headed guy wearing an Adidas jump suit and looking exactly like some kind of Mexican gang banger.  He was missing some teeth too.  Great, this was the underbelly of town, the place where all the punk yakuza underlings and wanna-be’s strutted their shit and ran their cons.  After wandering around the intersection for a while we all began to feel uneasy and decided to head back home.  Before we got back on the subway we were approached by no less then 3 Jamaican expatriates in the half hour time we where there, asking us if we wanted to go ‘party’.  All of us knowing better and being pretty tight on cash declined the offers.  Due to this one of my friends, who is of Jamaican decent, refused to take off his hat in public.  He didn’t want the wrong people to see his dreds and think he was someone else’s Jamaican on the wrong turf.  We all made fun of him for that one.

            This next story comes from the third trip but isn’t so much random, as perpetrated by us, we just took advantage of the situation.  One night returning to the hostel we passed by a hardware store that we pass every time.  This time was different; there was a derelict washing machine on the curb in front of it.  Opportunity presents it’s self and we all told the Jamaican (don’t ask why we picked him, it was kind of automatically unanimous) to stand inside the thing so we could take pictures of the bizarre event.  He eventually complied and away we photographed.  Even though appliances are disposed of in similar fashions in America it struck us as bizarre to see it sitting there that night.  We had already developed a bizarre feeling towards the store in general due to their battery vending machine.

            On my first trip to Japan I didn’t notice the visible homeless population until a few days in country.  On two separate homeless sightings I was set back due to the oddness of each.  The first one was watching a homeless man carry on a conversation using a cell phone.  Now, in hindsight, the phone might not have been activated and the man could have been completely out of his gourd.  If the phone was operational it was pretty bizarre to see someone who was with out the necessities of survival possessing an operational cell phone, much less have someone else with whom he could contact and carry on a conversation with.  If that was the case why was this guy homeless?  Couldn’t he have stayed with the other person?  Or was he talking to another bum buddy who also had a cell phone?  

The other event was stumbling upon a very inventive temporary vagabond residence.  While wandering Shinjuku one day I came across a house/fort built under a staircase made entirely of discarded manga.  Manga is pretty plentiful as everyday various publications are released to the public at convenience stores and train station kiosks.  People buy them to read on the train during their morning commute and many of them leave them behind or discard of them.  The manga volumes only run around 2 to 3 dollars, so it’s not too much to spend if you are discarding it, hell it costs more for a cup of coffee.  So some erstwhile hobo gathered and continued to gather a vast number of discarded manga to use as building materials for his hovel under the stairs, among the most expensive real estate in the world.  If he ends up being bored he can always dismantle the west wall and revisit his favorite comics.

            My fourth trip to Tokyo didn’t incur any odd events that I can recall though…I spent a good deal of my time that trip biking around the city.  Due to my own confusion I did spend a great deal of time getting lost.  Most of the trip I stayed at my friends house west of Tokyo, but for a few days I stayed at a hostel east of Akihabara called Khaosan Tokyo Ninja.  I should have expected a hotel with Ninja in its name to be hard to find!  In an epic journey lasting about 4 hours I travelled by bike from Yoyogi to the hostel in Chuo-ku.  Instead of heading east I got turned around in Shinjuku and headed due south until I realized I was going the wrong way…by that time I was in the heart of Suginami-ku.  I retraced my steps and got back to Shinjuku.  After riding some more I found myself northern Tokyo and eventually ended up at Ueno station.  By this time I had been riding around quite a bit but was happy to know where I was finally.  I struck off south to Akihabara and started to try and zero in on the hostel with my map and a few other tools.  After wandering around the neighborhood for what seemed like an hour I finally found it…much to my relief.  The 3^rd and final koban (neighborhood police box) I stopped at happened to be 3 blocks from the hostel!  At one point not far from Shinjuku I thought I had wound up on the express way as the cars passing me were going pretty quickly.  Given the expressions by the police at the koban near that road as I explained where I came from I was probably somewhere bikes don’t normally travel.

            I guess the oddest situation from the 4^th trip was again due to getting lost trying to zero in on an unfamiliar address.  Earlier in the day I had hooked up with an ex-bike messenger from Canada who runs a photography company called Chapter 9.  We hung out for the afternoon trolling around Shibuya waiting for a bike messenger welcoming party to start in the evening.  We decided to take off and find the club.  When we realized we over shot our turn we had a hard time trying to get back to the same area.  With some fruitless wandering 2 more lost bike messengers joined us to wander even more.  We had all had enough and just wanted to ask someone for directions.  I was the only one in the group that really spoke any Japanese so I was elected to ask for directions at a bar we stopped at.  I hoped off of my bike, letting the humid September air hit me full force after all the biking around and instantly turned into a sweating behemoth.  I walked into the small bar and eagerly greeted the air conditioned space.  However, the comfortable, low key businessman bar was NOT eager to welcome me into its midst.  I could have sworn the music even stopped as everyone stared at me.  I think the bar tender even cut off his engrained cry of irrashaimase when he saw me.  Allow me to paint the picture.  6’2” white guy clad in a sweaty t-shirt, cut off military cargo pants, bike shoes, cycling cap, messenger bag, arms full of tattoos, face full of piercings.  Yeah…not what any of these suit wearing businessmen were even remotely expecting to encounter that evening.  The host quickly rushed to me to find out what I wanted.  When he understood I was looking for directions he politely asked me to wait outside for him.  I realized what he was doing and quickly exited the building while uttering an apology and a grin to everyone watching me.  I came outside to expectant looks and explained the situation.  A few minutes passed and two employees came out, one more equipped to speak English and they helped to get us back to the area of the club, which once we got to, was easy to find!

            Irreshaimase and the lack of most people wanting to actively speak English brings me to the final tale of oddity.  This one goes back to my first trip to Tokyo.  I was nearing the end of my stay and one evening I wanted a large cup of ginger ale (which the Japanese have everywhere).  There was a chain burger joint next to the train station by the hostel I was staying at in Minato-ku.  I wandered in, received the now anticipated irrashaimase and headed to attempt to order a large ginger ale in Japanese.  I was the only customer in the place at that time and walked right up to the young woman, perhaps my age, at a register.  I asked her if she spoke English and without missing a beat she replied in the clearest most casual Midwestern accented English I had heard “Yeah, what do you want?”  I was so incredibly shocked by this unanticipated development that I lost the ability to form actual words.  In English, just as strained as my Japanese at that time, I replied ‘Uh…a large ginger ale please…’  She came back again, perfect English, ‘do you want that for here or to go?’  Me; ‘uh…uhm…to go, I guess…yeah’.  She told me how much I owed in perfect English, pushed the tray for me to put my money into and I dug into my pocket full of change to put in the tray.  ‘I’ll be right back with your soda.’  I was shocked…stupefied.  Here was this young woman/high school student, who spoke perfect, Middle American accented English…working the register of a fast food restaurant.  My head was racing with the first straightforward English conversation I had has in a week and the idea that this woman wasn’t working as a translator for some multi-national company making some serious cash.  I took my soda, smiled feebly and wandered out into the oppressive May humidity.

             I'm sure as I return to Japan again and again I will continue to experience odd things, which adds quite a bit of entertainment to the trips.