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Thursday, January 3, 2002
Loan words
Because if English has these terms, they're *still* not the same thing.
Teiki(ken)- commuter pass on the train/subway. Buyable in month units, from 1 month to 1 year. A thin piece of laminated nothing that slides into the automated machines at the kaisatsuguchi. You can buy special pass cases that are leather or plastic frames, with the sides open so your thumb can slide the teiki out quicky and efficiently. You see kids going to and from school with their pass cases on straps around their necks.
Kaisatsu-guchi: The turnstiles, the gates that mark the exit of the railway line. But they aren't stiles that turn and they aren't exactly gates. They have two wings that pull apart to let you through, or stay apart to let you through but close with a ding-dong chime if you a) use the wrong teiki to try to get through; b) use a ticket or teiki not valid for the station you got off at; and sometimes c) put your ticket in the wrong way. Then the wings stay closed for what seems an inconveniently long time, maybe 10 seconds, while the backed-up crowds funnel off to the other kaisatsuguchi and the offender goes off in puzzlement to the fare adjusment machines. (In a case of reverse loan-wordism, no gaijin I know ever remembers what those things are called in Japanese. They're seisanki, I believe, but don't take my word for it.) The worst station for ringing kaisatsuguchi is Hamamatsucho, end terminus for people coming from other parts of Japan into Haneda airport and having no idea how Tokyo institutions work. Gets to be a chorus at times.
Kiseru: we don't have this at all, but it's fun. Teiki run between any two stations on a line, and sometimes will run between lines, depending on how co-operative the train company feels like being with the subway company. When you get on a station that's outside the limit of your teiki, intending to get off at a station within the limits of your teiki, you're supposed to conscientiously buy a ticket whose price covers the distance between the station you get on and the first station of your teiki. As it might be, I get on at Kamakura in the countryside, 1250 yen before Shinjuku, the first station on my teiki, and naturally buy a 1250 yen ticket. Not. I buy a 120 yen ticket, ride happily for 40 minutes, get off at Shinjuku and use my teiki to exit. (Oh- of course you have to insert a ticket or a teiki to get out of the station. This always caused me great anxiety my first day or two home, when I dropped my token into the subway box and then *didn't have a ticket* to get me off again.)
Kiseru is the old fashioned Japanese pipe, used from Edo times. It had a metal bowl and a metal mouthpiece, and the rest of it was made of bamboo. So the start of it is metal (paying money for your 120 yen ticket) and the end of it is metal (because you paid money for your teiki) but the middle is worthless and free bamboo.
And you can't do it any more. The teiki are now coded to register if you used them at the start of a trip. If you didn't and try to exit with your teiki, the kaisatsuguchi doesn't let you pass. You have to show the ticket you first bought to the exit attendant, and it better be for 1250 yen when you're coming back from Kamakura.
I'll just add that I assumed, when I first came to Japan, that kiseru-ing was an accepted part of the system because, well, hell, how could you prevent it? I had a prof at Japanese school, Sanada-sensei, an older man who viewed life a tad sardonically. He was the one who explained to us why it was called kiseru. When I naively said after the explanation "But I thought you were supposed to do that- isn't that how the system works?" he nearly had a heart attack laughing. (And had to go tell the rest of the teachers, naturally.) In fact it says something about our cultures, because I had the reflex western attitude of Well they can't catch you doing it so of course you're allowed to do it. He had the Japanese attitude of No-one makes you be honest- you just are.
Jido hanbaiki: 'automatic vending machines.' Somehow jidou hanbaiki flows off the tongue more easily than vending machine. Enough has been said about these pearls of Japanese culture. I have nothing to add except that I miss them, and occasionally miss them desperately. Practically the only decent tea to be had anywhere, in my opinion.
Koban: the police boxes situated here and there, anywhere you might need to ask directions. Staffed by omawari-san, cops on the beat. For some reason, koban cops are all shortish and stocky and give the reassuring feel of teddy bears. Might be the uniforms, of course, but maybe they send the lanky recruits into another line. It was a koban policeman (not really a cop- in us the institution maps onto British attitudes, not American ones) who politely taught me the polite word for penis when I went to report a flasher. And no, I wasn't trying to use a yaoi equivalent, because I didn't know them in those days. I said, quite properly, "And then he-" stop, glance downwards, turn hand over. "Ahh," the omawari-san said unmoved, "mono wo dashitan desu ne." Yes. He did indeed take his thing out. In residential sections the cops really are on the beat, and come wandering about to call on the inhabitants and chat. You offer them tea, gossip a bit, the omawari-san gets a feel for how the neighbourhood works, and so if somebody hasn't seen old Granny Watanabe out on her constitutional that day, the omawari-san will drop by to see if she's OK. You can imagine how this institution goes down with westerners. When my roomies at the house first moved in and the omawari-san came by to see the new arrivals, they went and got the English-speaking guy next door and told him to tell the man to go away cause it was none of his business who lived in the house. "The nerve of him!"
Gaman and ganbaru: Because western patience and stick-to-it-iveness aren't the same things at all.
Enryo: Because western reserve, constraint and not-intruding aren't the same things at all either.
Meishi: business cards, yes, but a step beyond. A major social institution and hence deserving of the native word. Slops over onto the 19th century's use of calling cards. 'My card' the 19th century gentleman says, and you put it on a silver salver and take it to the mistress. 'Watakushi, kouiuu mono de gozaimasu' the modern Japanese says, and you take his/ her card in both hands, look at it even if you can't read it, keep it on the table until the interview is over or put it carefully into your card case, to be transferred to your business-card file when you get home. One wonders what, if anything, palm pilots have done to the Japanese institution of meishi.
(o)-Matsuri: Because a Japanese festival is different from a western festival, supposing there are folk festivals in North American cities in the first place which, trust me, there aren't.
But now we're getting into the realm of 'doesn't exist over here at all'- sento, jinja, onsen, rotenburo, shinkansen, izakaya, dani, mushiatsui. For another time.
Tuesday, January 1, 2002
Blue Skies No Clouds
It was in early August that our professor said, "Pay attention to the weather next week. It'll be clear." We looked at her dubiously. Clear and cloudy don't have much meaning in summer Tokyo. Clear ought to mean 'blue', and cloudy should mean 'having clouds'. But in Tokyo the sun shines remorselessly through, not in, a shimmering sky the colour of molten metal. No blue, no clouds, just that glaring and painful sea of greyish-silver haze. It sickens the soul. After two or three weeks of it you forget the notion of a coloured sky and discrete clouds entirely.
But the next week the sky was blue and it was dotted with large fluffy white clouds. Half the population of Tokyo had gone back to the countryside for o-Bon, leaving their cars at home. The trains were half-empty in the morning. The place felt totally different.
And the same thing happens at New Year's. The winter sky tends to be bluer and drier anyway than the summer one, but at New Year's everything becomes crisp. The faint yellowish haze that fuzzes the horizon and colours the pale winter-light is gone. The city is quiet and empty under a great inverted bowl of blue sky that stretches down to the earth. Out in Heiwadai I could see the mountains of Chichibu distant beyond Kanpachi-doori. Down in Koenji I could see the cone shape of Mt Fuji from the end of the railway platform, black against the sunset. And here today, in Toronto, the sky looks much the same as then. Strong winter sunshine casts shadows of bare branches on the sidewalk and the city is as empty, as quiet, as holiday-peaceful, as Tokyo.
Tuesday, January 1, 2002
Oronamin C
It comes in little brown glass bottles. It has a very yellow and red label. It has a metal-and-plastic pull cap that's a pain to dispose of. It still cost 100 yen when all the other soft drinks went to 110. You buy it from vending machines and station Kiosks (the newspaper stands) and drink it on the platform or in the street. The bottle goes in the glass recycling bin, but there's never any 'general garbage' bin to put the top into. Since the bottle is brown and you never pour the stuff into a glass, you can remain unaware all your life that it's the colour of a vitamin-taker's pee. That's possibly because it has a bunch of vitamins in it. Also minerals and iron and caffeine and nicotine and things one doesn't want to know about. It would have cocaine and amphetamines if the Japanese government allowed cocaine and amphetamines, but I have to say, it doesn't need them. Oronamin C slays cold fatigue and heat prostration, and does a not-bad job on jetlag. Stagger up to the jidou hanbaiki, grab a bottle, chug-a-lug it, and go happily on your way.
Only nowadays it's harder to find vending machines with Oronamin C and they try to make you settle for Suntory's Dekavita instead. It comes in a larger brown glass bottle with a yellow and red label and is the colour of well-watered pee. But it just doesn't work the same.
Saturday, December 29, 2001
Emergency Supplies
There are things you have to bring from home and get friends to send you when you run out and stock up on when you visit home again.
Anti-perspirant. The Japanese have deodorants, small little perfumed sticks. I was told even those were a recent innovation and people who came here ten years ago didn't have them. An ad for same showed a young woman in jeans sitting on the hood of her car, obviously waiting for her boyfriend or something, and casually in a soigne fashion pulling down the neck of her tshirt to apply a little more deodorant to her underarm. One understands the need to reapply something that didn't work that well to start with, in the nine-month-round humidity of an island country, even if we can't see smearing a deodorant stick as the romantic equivalent of dabbing on some more cologne. (See 'Unreal City', below.) Japanese women wear stockings and polyester even in summer and never seem to sweat at all, but a Japanese friend later told me they were Martians. Real Japanese sweat, she said. I know.
Tampons. I mean, they have them, but their superplus is the size of a super, their super is a regular, their regular is a junior, and their junor is the size of a pencil. I don't know if this difference is based on sexual mythology or actual physiology, but people who need real superplus can't get them.
Sinutabs. The Japanese don't have a word for sinus, or rather, their word for sinus is an obscure medical term not in common use. The dreaded sinus headache that everyone gets over here evidently doesn't exist over there. Mind you, we don't suffer from all the liver ailments the French do either even if we drink as much as them. Disease is culture specific.
Codeine. Obviously. Canada may be the only place I know of where you can buy this over the counter. Makes for a lot of codeine-addicted Canadians, perhaps, but hey, we're feeling no pain. Of course, the Japanese think pain is just one of those 'shou ga nai' things you put up with. Are you in labour? Please stop making all that noise. You'll disturb the other mothers.
Comfort foods, but that's true anywhere. Homesick Americans go to the gaijin stores at the foot of Omote-sando or in Azabu, and pay through the nose for El Paso taco mix. The comfort food I wanted wasn't available from the supermarkets and cost even more in the restaurants, supposing there were restaurants that served this exotic stuff in the first place. There was no cheap Chinese, meaning Szechuan or Cantonese with the spices left in. Not breaded chicken as per north America or breaded pork as per Japan. Real Chinese is haute cuisine in Tokyo and costs what French does here. Middle Eastern- no Falafel Huts, no Aida, no El Basha Tony. I could get couscous in a Shinjuku department store, and tinned chickpeas, and gaman, as the Japanese say- make do- with that. But I'd always have one pig-out on babaganouj and real hummous and tabbouleh when I came back. Greek- no souvlaki or dolmada or salads piled high with feta. And worst, no pierogies, let alone the sour cream to put on them. I could have managed without the rest if I'd had pierogies now and again. (Well, I come from Toronto, that international hodgepodge, and that's what we eat downtown.) What was available in Tokyo, fortunately, was good affordable Indian. A chain called Samrat, with an outlet in Shinjuku on the fifth floor of a building along from Studio Alta. The lunch set gave you two (smallish but sufficient) entrees, rice and nan for about $10. Of course, the necessary raita set you back another 600 yen, but maybe yoghurt is expensive in Tokyo.
Comfort medication. Like the food above. When you've got a cold, you want Nyquil. When you've got a cough you want Benylin. When your stomach hurts you want Tums. In time I found that Japanese cold stuff works OK, especially Paburon Gold, and whatever the pharmacist gave me for diarrhea. (That country still needs a good anytime heartburn medication cause all they have is premeal prophylactics, and western heartburn doesn't work that way.) But you're dependent on your pharmacist for all of this, because practically no real medication is out on the shelf. You have to ask. That's why gaijin tend to ask at the American Drugstore in Hibiya, where the staff speak English. That's also the only place you can get a western hotwater bottle, if you happen to be as addicted to them as I am. Japanese hotwater bottles are uncomfortable traditional things- made of metal, the general shape of a chafing dish, and hard to find. And you can't rest your aching shoulder or neck on them and go to sleep when you have a headache.
And of course, you can't get aspirin or cold stuff anywhere but at a pharmacy because that's what pharmacies are for. So stock up before the drugstores close, because the convenis don't have them.
Friday, December 28, 2001
Jewels
The lights along the Kawagoe Kaidou are blue-white when I bike back from Jean's place in Itabashi-ku down Kanana-doori. I bike on the sidewalk because bicycles aren't allowed in the street unless, as is usual in the back streets, there is no sidewalk. The sidewalks are wide and empty always, and wider and emptier at night. Bumpy in places, well-used, not the raw concrete of home. You skirt the stairs of the occasional pedestrian bridge crossing the highway, because actual people-crossings are few. You usually find them when some older road comes down to meet the Kawagoe Kaidou and you have a small commercial centre- a shopping street, a cluster of convenience stores, stuff like that. Stop at a 7-11, pull the key from the automatic lock at the back of the bike. Get my Pepsi for tomorrow morning (not all convenis have Pepsi), get a sponge cake with sweet mocha filling in the centre, push my key back into the spring-lock mechanism and go on my way again.
This isn't the real Kawagoe Kaidou, I believe- the old route the daimyos travelled on from Edo to Kawagoe and perhaps beyond. That's somewhere off to the north of me, with houses on it. For 250 years the daimyo, the feudal lords, had to spend one year in Edo and one year at home, and so spent most of their time getting from one place to another. You can tell the highways that were built for them to travel on. They have an inherent sense to them, a feeling of going someplace; and usually they're shopping streets as well, as they have been for centuries. The major highways of their time- where else would you set up shop? But they're too narrow for modern traffic. Now there are large eight-lane roads that go more or less in the same direction, but much more blandly and efficiently. Backed by faceless buildings mostly, small offices, warehouses, schools sometimes, and the occasional incongruous small house or restaurant.
I don't trust these highways, really. They go where the planners think they ought to go, or where the planners eventually intend them to go, so you risk being stranded when they suddenly peter out, the way Kanpachi doori does over to the west. Great big highway that suddenly stops in the middle of nowhere and becomes a narrow sidewalkless Japanese street, choked with cars, going god knows where as Japanese streets do. The whole notion of a grid system is foreign to Japan and certainly out here where there were fields not that long ago- fields that used to go in concentric squares around the owner's house, so now the streets do too.
But still I turn off and thread my way through the streets behind Kawagoe Kaidou. It's darker and more peaceful there-- single yellow bulbs in what street lights there are, occasional white lights in the cross streets that are actually going somewhere. Winter stars easily seen. The darkness is picked out by the occasional cluster of vending machines glowing lunar and white on a corner. Houses behind high cinderblock or stone walls. Two storey apartment houses covered in aluminum siding or ceramic tile- the universal building materials here- their inhabitants decorously asleep. No-one but me and the occasional salaryman returning from the last train, carrying his briefcase.
I have to be aware of the noise of the traffic to my left and the occasional glimpse of cars when I cross a down street, because this is a Japanese street that starts angling oddly at once. And the cars I glimpse down the cross streets, my signal for the highway, get farther and farther away with each cross street I pass. But it's OK, because I actually know this route, and know which street marks the boundary of safety- it's the one with the bright green rails on each side, my signal to go back to the highway. After that the streets here become Moebius. Wherever you think you're going, you're not. It may feel west but it's somehow become north, and you don't know it till you hit the railway lines.
Thank god for railway lines. They tie the city down, subdue its intransigent tendency to ignore basic concepts like north and south, east and west. I feel safe anywhere I'm bounded by railway lines- TobuTojo to the north, Seibu Ikebukuro to the south. The trouble with Kanpachi is just that- it peters out miles from any railway line, with no straight streets going anywhere. Like being in a desert and looking for a landmark. But the green-railed street means nearly home. Back down to the highway, across at the big car dealership, continue on the south side past the long stretch of market garden fields. Resist the urge to take my left onto the narrow little street with the little wooden houses and go down through Nishiki itchome. I think I know its curving streets by now, but I don't, and will only end up miles from home at the park. Wait till the boring auto rental place, and the boring but relatively straight street that runs relatively parallel to Kanpachi. Bike down that, hit the nameless street with the light, cross that, take the curve between the old scrap yard and the large Japanese-style house, ride past the danchi, and there I am, looking at a vista of cabbage fields under the moon. Home is waiting two streets over to my left.
Thursday, December 27, 2001
Four quarters- northwest
My section of greater metropolitan Tokyo was the north-west. ('Section' of course includes 'and all related train lines to a minimum of twenty miles from the station.') My centre was Ikebukuro- scuzzy and uninteresting and unchic as it was considered then and thereafter. For a good meal I went to Takadanobaba, two stations down from Ikebuk. I taught among the azalea bushes of Komagome, three stations up. Occasionally I made it all the way down to Shinjuku, for Kinokuniya bookstore and Shinjuku Gyoen, the big park, stopping at the used bookstores in Shin-Okubo, the stop before Shinjuku.
I lived first in an inn in the sidestreets of west Ikebukuro, a few streets away from the hostess bars and pachinko palaces and the yakuza-run establishments, and the greasy smell of open ramen restaurants and the grimy sidewalks slick with the pulp of flyers handed out and discarded by passersby. The inn itself was spotless and beautiful, and immensely difficult to locate, a little oasis tucked away round a corner in a slightly more upperscale pocket of nishi-Ikebukuro. Then for two months I was in a gaijin house on the TobuTojo line from Ikebuk. The station was Tobu-nerima, but the house itself was just over the line into Itabashi-ku. It was a very civilized and homey gaijin house, run-down of course, but just enough to make it feel quaint rather than scuzzy. It was not at any rate the den of garbage and drunken males and 9x9' rooms going for $1000 a month that the term 'gaijin house' usually conveys.
For a year I got as far south as I was ever to go, Koenji on the Chuo line from Shinjuku, in the refained heart of Nakano-ku. I lived in a shared house and I was miserable. (Only Americans are capable of living successfully with other Americans. The rest of us lack the gene.) Koenji is actually OK- lots of mangaka have their studios there. But I was across Waseda-doori in Yamatocho, a place with pretensions. No-one is capable of living with Yamanote-wannabe Tokyoites, that prune-faced frozen tribe, and that includes other Tokyoites.
Happily I moved back to a dorm in Nerima, at Heiwadai five stops from Ikebukuro on the Yurakucho line. It was what my university friends used to jokingly say they wanted their parents to buy, a farm on the subway line. It was on a subway line, it was surrounded by farms- cabbages, mostly- plus the occasional lumber yard, and I thought it was heaven.
That was my daily world. Toshima-ku, Itabashi-ku, Nerima-ku, the 'nothing' wards of north-west Tokyo. Tobu-nerima, Tokumaru, Heiwadai. TobuTojo, a domestic-feeling train line that goes out to the mountains eventually. Yurakucho-sen, that meets up with the TobuTojo line out to the west, meaning you can, or could, go out to see the mountains for nothing on your subway commuter pass. The Yurakucho-sen crosses Tokyo diagonally and eventually lands you at Tokyo Bay in the south east, and takes in almost everything else on its way. I name these places and lines for my own pleasure, because they won't mean anything to anyone else who hasn't lived in Tokyo, or even, who hasn't lived in the same section of Tokyo as I have. But if you have you'll know what they mean.
Tuesday, December 25, 2001
'Unreal City'
The first thing that struck me about Tokyo, on my first visit there, was how impossible it was to register the place in any way that made sense. As if I'd been handed an artifact without a proper mental framework to fit it into. Worse, as though the mental faculties that ought to apprehend reality had suddenly been suspended. It was nothing. It wasn't a whole. There was no there there, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, but it was a different not-thereness from the blank lack of place that most American cities I know have.
It wasn't like a European city, close enough to Us to let one appreciate the differences. It wasn't like what one sees of India or Africa, so different from Us that you have to download a different mental character-set to see its reality in the first place. What it looked like most of all was a pastiche of a western city, but one constructed on totally arbitrary lines- by a lunatic, by someone who didn't understand the proper use of the elements they were borrowing and incorporating in the first place.
Our bus was met in front of the hotel by a bellboy in complete monkey suit and pillbox hat. A pillbox hat, like someone from an old Phillip Morris ad on the back of a Life magazine from the 40's. What was that doing in a big city at the end of the 20th century? The teenaged girls seen on the sidewalk, in middy blouses that English girls' schools stopped wearing fifty years ago. The boys in turn-of-the-century highnecked uniforms. Train seats with antimacassars on the backs. White linen, exquisitely starched, with a lace edge, dating from the 19th century. It's not like the flotsam that shows up in Africa, the remnants of Empire that got left behind and that the inhabitants use because it's there and handy- like the white wigs that the black judges in east Africa once wore because that's what the white judges in England still wear. Japan was never colonialized. The pillbox hat, the middy blouse, the antimacassar- that was borrowed on purpose, and I never could figure out why.
That was before I learned to stop wondering why.
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