Phantom Tokyo

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Xmas '01 on
Jan '02
Third batch

There's a restaurant in TO that has its bread flown in from Paris. A waste of effort, of course, since by the time it gets here it's day-old bread, and however marvellous it was when baked by the exclusive bakery of N'importe-Qui, day-old bread is day-old bread. Now if they brought in French butter... but of course they're not allowed to.

But if I won the lottery what I'd have shipped in, by the planeload, is Japanese batteries. You may think all batteries function alike, but they don't. They're different shapes and even sizes, just for a start. Miniscule, but enough to make a difference. Certain South American batteries don't even register to my Japanese-made appliances as batteries at all. North American batteries are well enough, but their operation is a bit rough, shall we say. Lots of power, but no finesse in the delivery. Japanese gadgets with Japanese working parts expect to have Japanese batteries running them, and don't perform optionally when they use foreign batteries. Is all. I mention this fact for anyone contemplating bringing small Japanese thingummies back with them. (It probably works in reverse too, because my reliable and expensive Walkman, made in Japan but for the foreign market, was always a touch crotchety Over There, and once broke down completely.)

So anyone ever wonders what to send me as presents or omiyage, that's the answer. Lawson's or SONY AA batteries. Preferably in bulk.

I grew up without television. It was there and the others watched it a lot, but I figured books were better cause I could stop the action and replay it in my head the way it should have gone, and then pick it up again and go on until the next time the author screwed up. That's still my problem with seeing movies in a theatre, by the way. No pause button.

But that means I never developed the ability to ignore a television, and that meant I was never able to function totally in a Japanese house when I was a guest, because almost everyone I knew kept their televisions on all the time. Some of these were people twenty years older than myself who couldn't have grown up with TV and who must have developed the taste for it as adults. Whatever, the fact is that the TV is part of the Japanese family as I experienced it. It's always there, sitting in its corner talking to itself. Everyone else ignores it like some demented relative, or the guy near Bathurst and Bloor with the lovely resonant announcer's voice who walks up and down the streets having great running commentaries that make no sense at all. But if you wonder if possibly the Japanese might just turn it off for a bit, they're a little surprised. Why do you want the TV off? Why would you want the TV off? It's like asking to have the music turned off in a restaurant- which people with sensitive ears would like to if they dared, on the grounds that it interferes with both conversation and enjoyment of one's food. (That's not me, BTW. I can live with music, even if it does indeed interfere with conversation.)

I can say, and I did say, that at my level of Japanese listening to two Japanese conversations while trying to take part in one confused me, but it wasn't the whole truth. The truth is that if the TV's on I have to pay attention to the TV, because the TV's voice is deeper and more attention-grabbing than the human one. And I'm still not sure what it's there for. Old people in any neighbourhood I've lived in turn it on at 6 in the morning, and turn it on loud is how I know it's turned on, and keep it on all day. It must be the 'more the merrier' social sense, I figure. Gosh this apartment is empty with just the two of us, let's turn on a game show and have six more people plus a studio audience. Ah good. *Now* the place feels lively.

(The flip side of that is the gaijin notion of camping. My roommates were disgusted at how the Japanese camped. "There's dozens of them and they pitch their tents side by side and all facing in the same direction, and they call that camping!" Citychild me thought that was indeed a very rational way to camp, if one were going to indulge that uncomfortable and overrated pastime in the first place. At least you had people around you to ameliorate the drawbacks of insects and lumpy ground and primitive toilets and no hot water. My roomies thought camping meant getting out in wilderness totally by yourself without another human being anywhere near you. Hell, I sniffed, I've done that on the grounds of the Imperial Palace. Go to Kitanomaru park on a weekday, wander off, there's nobody there- and given where there is, that means nobody within a kilometre of you at least- right in the centre of Tokyo. And it still feels very wrong, even in the centre of Tokyo. Do that in Yellowstone, I figure, and you get eaten by a bear and no-one even knows.)

Two mandatory gift-giving seasons in Japan, one in mid-summer and one just before New Year's. They're a pain to people who belong firmly inside the culture, but fun for the semi-outsider like me. Sometime in mid-December you go to a department store- Tobu will do, but since my list of recipients was very short I went to Mitsukoshi for the eclat of having Mitsukoshi wrapping paper on my o-seibo present. You poke about the o-seibo gift section, deciding do you want to give soap or do you want to give tea or do you want to give edibles. I'd get something usable-by-the-kids for my guarantor, though now I can't remember what exactly that was. Packaged fruits, maybe, or jams? Tell the nice Mitsukoshi store clerk that you want the 3000 yen box, and fill out the address form, and get complimented on your Japanese, and walk away with a sense of accomplishment to go do the fun buying, the boxes of cookies to give to the dorm's harried but pleasant super and to the urusai neighbour lady and to the boss, who didn't approve of o-seibo himself but who of course welcomed presents which could then be recycled to the students' parents.

And of course as a teacher you get o-seibo presents yourself, often recycled stuff too but often not. The mothers of my Tsukishima little girls gave me a maroon shawl one year of the kind the Japanese wear over their coats, and pinned with a brooch usually. My coat was a functional green oilcloth thing not meant to be dressed up in such a feminine fashion (if I wore a certain pair of pants with it I'd get muttered remarks when I went into washrooms about 'this is the women's what the hell do you think you're doing here?') but I've worn it with every coat I've had since. Even in Toronto it keeps me warm, years later when my little girls must now be junior high students.

And of course the other thing, more tedious, was the New Year's cards. Bought in stacks from the PO to allow for bad drafts and mistaken kanji, and written laboriously by me with much angsting over how you address a card to a married woman when you don't know her first name. It's a problem, but I found out the answer. Which, times being what they are, is probably not correct any more.

And *this* is the time of year that I came home for Christmas, to my disorganized and unsatisfactory house unseen for eleven months (mostly) and hence stuck in time since the last time I'd seen it, so that from '91 to '96 it only aged three months and a few weeks. No wonder I had to rearrange everything when I came home for good. The place still smelled of December 1990.

Because of jetlag the homecomings all felt like drug dreams, and because it's going-east jetlag the first few days also carried the urge to suicide with them. For those first few nights I slept in the side bedroom on the extremely thick and inert futon I had there. The side bedroom is dark and silent and a perfect place to hide from unpleasant reality, and on occasion I've slept 24 hours there when returning from Japan. I still gravitate to it even now when coming back from trips. Eventually I move to the front room, or else I'd never wake up at all.

And for half my stay I didn't wake up, not properly. I also tended to drift off when threatened with social occasions, like family get-togethers at my cousins' out in the country or lunches with various aunts. I'd go to the daycare and see what was available kid-wise over Christmas- usually not much- and come home and sleep and wake up and write a little and generally putz through my days.

'93 was different, of course, though I came home to a broken furnace that first night and contracted stomach flu two days afterwards. I was in love and I was writing, and it made for a lovely holiday. I had the latest Papuwa ep on me, that had appeared four days before my departure, and it sat on the marble table in my bedroom with a couple of doujinshi and reminded me what had happened in my life these last four months. I got up early and wrote scenes with Magic and Servis as the dawn started outside, and it was as close to perfect content as I've ever come.

"Aren't I usually in Japan around this time of year?" I thought a week ago. And thought Shit yes, exactly this time of year, in '96 when the dates fall on the same days as this year. Woke early on Dec 1 in my room at Kimi Ryoukan, sun on the tatami of course even then, and reached over to my bags to check my admit pass to the exam to see what time it started and when I had to be at Waseda, good old familiar Waseda a stop from Takadanobaba on the Touzai-sen. Saw I was to get there by 9:30 on...heisei 8-nen 12-gatsu *8ka*. Damn Jean. Got the day wrong when she sent me the info. Rolled on my other side in the futon and went back to sleep.

So I spent the day at Ueno and then the Nezu art gallery instead, which isn't in Nezu, that odd pocket of a past time over the hill from Tohdai and along the street from Ueno's Shinobazu Pond. It's actually a trek down from Harajuku into the rich expat gaijin lands of Aoyama and Azabu. I say down because it feels down, but the map tells me it's actually across and that Omoote-sandou is virtually an east-west street, which feels all wrong. Keep following the street the Nezu art gallery is on and it'll turn and drop you at Hiroo, which feels like it shouldn't be possible.

Let me say now that the schematic form of the subway map always screwed my notions of what was where in the gaijin lands. It's a transit vacuum there, for one thing, so the isolated subway outpost of Roppongi the gaijin playground was in my mind half a city away from the old southern-Tokyo area of Shiba-kouen and the certified shitamachi of Shinbashi. In fact Roppongi's just a little up the road from the first and a hop skip and jump from the second. And all of these, including Shiba, are well to the *west* of the Imperial Palace, which also seems all wrong.

The Nezu bijutsukan has a little-park-in-a-little-valley attached to it with half a dozen tea ceremony houses dotting the paths along its treed slopes. On Sundays there's always one cha-no-yu society or another having sessions there and then taking in the art gallery itself. Most times I've been there I've spent more time looking at the women's kimono than the (rather indifferent) objects on display. This time I was there in mid-afternoon, when the sun starts to set, and watched the gingko trees up the hill glowing golden in the slanting rays, and noted the fallen tiny red maple leaves on the many steps up and down the hillside to the pond at the bottom, darkly reflecting the blue sky far above, and felt enormously happy.

This was for the nohryoku shiken, the Japanese ability exam, first or second Sunday in December, depending. A regular rite of the late 90's until I figured the hell with it, I'll never remember how you write enough kanji to pass that part, and my hearing ability will never get better either, which means I'll always be those 2 or 3 percentage points from a pass at level 1. But a week later in '96 I was happily in Waseda, on another sunny golden day rather like today's but infinitely warmer, experiencing for the first time that leisurely process that is the exam in Japan. 90 minutes of exam. Hour break. 45 minutes of exam. Two hour break. Two hours and change of exam, and out to the late afternoon world. (Here in TO they give it to you bang-bang-bang, fifteen minute breaks between sections and no more. No leisurely lunches and window-shopping here, but since it's at York U, the frozenest wastelands of North (Pole) York, it's as well.) I dawdled about the Waseda campus on my breaks, ate at the local Macdos along with the rest of the world, idly plotted Jan/Sabi stories, and rolled back in to do the next section. A pleasant and untaxing afternoon, on the whole. (It was also level 2, which I could do in my sleep, and did.)

I was going to visit my old students afterwards, but had time to spare, and spent it walking along Waseda doori away from Takadanobaba. A little later a gaijin woman who'd been walking behind me asked if this was the way to the station. I said no, station was back that way, and I was heading back myself so we walked together. She was from Gunma, teaching up there, and talked happily of how much she enjoyed it. 'It's where the Christians fled in the Tokugawa persecutions, so they've always been more tolerant of outsiders there than most of Japan.' There are people I meet occasionally who demonstrate to me what the Japanese mean when they say someone is 'bright' as in not dark rather than intelligent, and she was one of them. None of our English words quite gets the whole of the concept, not even the Johnny-come-lately and to me watercolour term 'positive.' (If it was basic to our culture we'd have a word for it and we don't, which is proof enough for me that we're a culture of neurotics, or of people in determined and terrified flight from neuroticism.) Happy and intelligent, an odd combination right there, and pleasant and confident and immensely likable. The kind of lucky person who will be happy and at ease and welcome anywhere. I'd like to have known her better- who wouldn't?- but strangers passing each other in Tokyo don't get a chance to do much more than wave and go on their ways. Much like the rest of the world, only more so.

Brave marin revient de guerre,
Tout mal chaussé, tout mal vêtu:
Brave marin d'où revient-tu ?

(I see that the version I have is different from the traditional one, which is as well.)

Johnson sent me a compilation tape in late '95 that I listened to all through that packing winter when not reading AnK. Folksongs and such, including Lowlands. Melancholy things about far-off wars in far-off cenruries. This was one of them.

Madame je reviens de guerre
Que l'on m'apporte du vin blanc
Que le marin boit en passant.

Brave marin se mit à boire,
Se mit à rire et à chanter:
Et la belle hôtesse a pleuré.

One of those grey days in Tokyo winter, which aren't so much grey as cream-coloured because of the pollution. I'm at Tokyo Station, I don't know why. An art exhibit at the Station Gallery, probably. Used to go to those a good deal. They had interesting stuff, the station and the gallery itself had a homelike feel, and the commute was of course a breeze. It was holiday time, classes cancelled, which was good because I'd had six weeks of revolving door bronchitis and was more than a little sick of my working-six-days-a-week Tokyo life. The Japanese think people like to work and have no idea what to do with themselves when they aren't working. That year the New Year's break coincided with a couple of weekends, to stretch the thing out to something like nine days off. My boss said Won't you be bored? I told him no, I have this and this and this to do, and he shook his head. A Japanese would be bored, he said.

Ah, qu'avez-vous, ma belle hôtesse?
Regrettez-vous votre vin blanc
Que le marin boit en passant?

C'est pas le vin que je regrette
Mes les soucis de mon mari
Et je crois bien que vous êtes lui.

There's a good restaurant in Tokyo Station itself (not the huge concourse beneath) if you want ordinary stuff like omuraisu and tonkatsu. Looks out on the Marunouchi side of the station, windows tucked between the odd buttresses of that odd Victorian building itself. With my book among the crowded tables in the big darkish room, among the commuters and office workers in their drab winter coats, eating the common undistinguished food of the Tokyoite. So much of Tokyo was like that so much of the time. Pedestrian, ordinary, not terribly bad but not at all good. Just there, a fact to be dealt with. Perhaps so much of life is like that anywhere, but abroad doesn't have the coziness and the comfort of familiar tackiness.

Ah taisez-vous, ma belle hôtesse
Vous avez là trois beaux enfants
Ma femme et moi nous n'avons qu'un.

J'ai t'en reçu la fausse lettre
Que vous aviez m'arrangé
Et moi je m'suis remariée.

When I think I want to go back, I remember things like that. The undistinguished sky. The monochrome crowds. The food that's 'any meat so long as it's pork'. The blandness, the commonplaceness, the nothing exactly wrong but nothing ever right either that's 90% of life in Japan.

Brave marin vida son verre,
Mit sur la table pièce d'argent
Alla rejoindre son regiment.

(from the files)
It's true, it's true-- the Japanese love to talk about making plans. I'm staying with the family of a Japanese friend, they find I'm off to Nagoya with no hotel reservations made, oh my oh my, out come the guidebooks out come the train schedules, they debate for half an hour the merits of the 11:15 train as opposed to the 11:58 taking into account the presence of a typhoon system (what if it rains and the train is stopped?), my lack of acquaintance with the Nagoya station (suppose I get lost?), and my utter ignorance of Nagoya city itself (a hotel *near* the station so I *don't* get lost.) Then son Koji calls for reservations, consults the guidebook again, finds a hotel right *next* to the station, makes a second reservation, cancels the first reservation, writes the hotel's name and address and phone in kanji, writes it again in roumaji, and draws up an itinerary for me while Mama and Papa give advice. If you spoke the language very well this might eventually get on your nerves (my French cousins do exactly the same thing and it does) but here, on the other side of the Pacific... well, as my hairdresser, a man famous for his bon mots, once said, "Never mind love-- what I want to feel is cherished": and I do.

(from the files)
People complain about the number of Japanese tourists one must contend with at Japanese tourist spots. I saw Nagoya-jo one Sunday in the middle of a monsoon and I can tell you, a Japanese tourist attraction without tourists is dismal indeed. All those empty floors all to oneself, and the cashiers at the souvenir booth with nothing to do, and the poor girl behind the refreshment counter staring sadly at the rain. Out in the rain, more encouragingly, was an elderly gentleman standing in front of the castle beside his son while daughter-in-law took the mandatory photograph. He had come to see Nagoya Castle with his family, dammit, and he wasn't about to let a mere monsoon stop him.

(Note for me- that was Sunday Sep 30, after leaving the Anmas' in Shizuoka

While I gazed out (nagame) regretfully at the long rains (nagai ame)- one of those untranslateable Japanese poems vaguely recalled from Kobun class. While I was gazing out at whatever it was last Saturday, Oct 12th, a day which I now no longer recall, one of my anniversaries passed me by unnoticed. Which leads to reflection on what the span of a fandom is, and whether one should still be having anniversaries of something that happened nine years ago, especially now that the mindset that made it so wonderful and so cataclysmic at the time is utterly lost. Had it not been for reading Hi Izuru last summer, I wouldn't even have a ghost of a memory of what it felt like to read the first three pages of the Nov '93 ep of Papuwa and feel my world turn upside down with joy and amazement.

A thorough-going fandom is like being in love. The world is all different and its priorities are all different and common sense doesn't even get a look-in. Little details matter immensely when you're under the enchantment, and the smallest things can make you utterly and absurdly happy, that later on make you shake your head in disbelief. 'I must have been on drugs.' But no matter. It's nice when it happens, and nice to know it can happen, and nice that one's ordinary rational daylight life can suddenly be filled with exaltation by the discovery that one black and white ink character is the twin brother of another black and white ink character.

(One wonders what other people do for this? Sane people, I mean-- non-fans. What is it that makes *them* blindingly happy? The religious have, sometimes, their religious revelations, but the mass of humanity? Is it a choice between lives of quiet contentment and lives of quiet desperation? Not that I see much quiet desperation in this place and age. Not-so-quiet chronic dissatisfaction seems more our speed and malaise.)

Slept in till 12 today and felt as I always do here, cheated out of part of my day. Can't think why it's like that. I used to sleep till 12 or later regularly in Tokyo, and thought it perfectly natural. It wasn't just the late-night life of an English teacher. It was nice being awake at 3 and 4 in the morning, doing my stuff with no psychic noise from the people around me to get in the way. The psychic buzz of other people was always there, even in semi-rural Heiwadai of the cabbage fields, where the only thing across the road from us was the back of a huge old house behind a high wall, and what ultimately turned into a parking lot between the wall and the house itself. I still felt surrounded by people, in a building that housed a good 75 women at any time, and out my balcony window was the usual two-storey apartment house, close enough for me to hear what was going on inside it. (Close enough for the downstairs woman there to hear everything that went on chez nous, poor woman. I felt for her. You're living your peaceful Nerima life and then some greasy politician- and Aoyama was as greasy as they come- puts up a four storey residence for foreigners to get himself brownie points from the shady religious group that backs him, and suddenly you've got loud-voiced Thais yammering every night and yelling 'Ahh shaddup!' when you ask them to keep it down. Don't know why the Thais were all so loud, or so rude, but they were. Their voices bounced off the next-door building so at first I thought the sound was coming from there, not the floor below me.)

This psychic claustrophobia was worse in residential Nakano-ku, of course, where one didn't even have the sense of space. Houses, houses, houses. People, people, people, all around you. Lisa said, and I agree, that you can't live in a city of 20 million people and not register it at some level. (Some people can, but some people have no nerves to speak of.) Always made me antsy. So I liked three am in Heiwadai, writing my stories, going out to the conveni, feeling the silence of almost everyone sound asleep and only a few other nighthawks, like little pinpoints of psychic light, providing the sensation of wakeful humanity.

(And of course, if you were up early in Tokyo, there was still no place to go that opened before 10, and even if there was you had to brave the rush-hour to do it. So naturally sleeping till 12 was much more rational.)

The double tenth, which was once some festival I've forgotten and was later made into a national holiday, Physical Education day, and which is now shifted around to correspond with the American Columbus Day, which I hope is accidental. I hadn't realized that holidays were being moved to make them fall on a Monday or a Friday till K told me. Such enlightenment seemed unlikely- the Japanese don't have the cultural concept of the long weekend, if only because so many of them work on the weekend. I checked my 2001-20002 daybook, to discover that indeed, last year the Double Tenth happened on the 8th, and Adults' Day in January, properly the 15th, happened on the 14th, but that March 21st still happened on Thursday March 21st. (Puzzlingly, Sep 15, which was a Saturday, remained on the Saturday, as it did in my day, and Sep 23 being a Sunday was prorogated to Monday, also as in my day.) It would also have me believe there are no holidays in June at all, which doesn't sort with my memory. I know I said you should be working as much as possible during rainy season, but this is ridiculous.

But in the days when things were ordered as they should be, in my first autumn in Japan, the double 10th saw me in Matsue, the city on the Japan Sea side of the island where Lafcadio Hearne nearly died of pneumonia. It was Hearne's centenary that year and he was being much feted through Japan, and especially in Matsue of course. This was towards the end of my two weeks' wandering, and Matsue is the last thing I remember clearly, with its samurai houses and its sunny happy matsuri under the green leaves and its bunch of Boy Scouts collecting money, who chorused 'Doumo arigatou gozaimashita' when I gave them a few hundred yen and then, registering my gaijin face, chorussed 'Sankyuu!!' I have never been able to remember where I spent that night, though I know I travelled in the evening through the dark countryside of Tottori. Nor the next- some city in Niigata, I believe, whose train station I can vaguely see in my head, but nothing else. Nagaoka perhaps- it had naga in the name. After that I came to Fukushima and, wuss that I was, never left it.

Some mezzanine kind of concourse, a Sunday evening, and the salarymen who'd come into work on Sunday taking their briefcases and bowing and leaving- and the fact that I felt it unusual for them to be here on a Sunday telling me obscurely that we weren't really in Japan, this was just a place with a lot of Japanese in it. Recruiting posters for what seemed the Malaysian army, and a number of short khaki'd types around as well, not Japanese, more Indonesian.

There was an open store with furniture, solid divans and chaise longues in wood, not new but not exactly antique, and I wanted one for the house, but the prices like all Tokyo prices, scary with zeros. $10,800, $12,000, and I wondered as always who could afford these things and where would they put them even if they could. But Japanese couples, well-dressed in the totally unremarkable upperclass Japanese style, were indeed sitting here and there at the expensive-looking dining tables they were buying, all a discreet and moneyed distance from each other, while clerks brought them their receipts with proper keigo deference.

There was a patisserie, the staff boxing up the wares at the end of the day, and I asked if they were closed- but what I said was 'Is it over?', and they said no, 'Ato yonpun,' you have four more minutes. So I asked if they had any coffee-flavoured cakes, and they laughed- of course they did- and I went crowding up to the cash register among the salarymen and the army types and a gaggle of school girls to get my slice of cake and pay for it.

Dream Tokyo is always like that- a real and solid place, full of feelings and life. The actual Tokyo isn't. It's a place whose reality is stretched very thin. There's nothing to it, and even the gaijin there go transparent and dreamlike after a while, as if they were living a drug dream. The life most Japanese lead isn't what a westerner calls life. Métro boulot dodo, much much more than the French, because the French have a notion that there should be more to life than work-commute-sleep and complain when they don't get it, while the Japanese just smile shou ga nai and go play pachinko. And while there are distinct advantages to everyone keeping their feelings under wraps and to themselves, the simplest way to dispose of inconvenient emotions is not to feel them in the first place, and I often feel that's what the Japanese do. Do the Japanese ever feel divine discontent? A sense that there could be more? We do, even if we've never heard the term, because an unconscious hankering for the paradise we were driven from is part of our culture. But them? It seems hard to believe. Group-cheerfulness is the norm. Certain well-bred Japanese women give me the fantods, Heart of Darkness variety- I feel if I poked my finger into them it would go right through the brittle outer shell, because that's all there is. Is there anyone in there? Are there any feelings? Anything uncontrolled and rough and dark? Or is it all as well-ordered, as smooth and polished inside as it is out?

(I knew a gaijin like that once- a couple actually- all bland WASP middle-class. Half the things I normally feel were emotions they'd never registered, didn't understand, and denied the possibility of. They gave me the same feeling a headless baby would, unnatural and vaguely terrifying. There's a difference between 'I've never been to the Pit but I can believe the Pit is there' and 'Pit? There is no Pit. There can't be.')

But precisely because Japan is so unreal, I find it congenial. I've been troubled by feelings of unreality since my teens. Then it took the form of literally doubting my own existence- a nightmare conviction that everything I saw was an hallucination, including the body I was in. Later it settled into a vague but distinct conviction that my life is a simulacrum of real life. Here I am standing at the stove making soup, but in fact it's only a pretence. Other people really make soup. I make something that looks like it but that might as well come from a tin. I used to want desperately to be as real as my friends, and tried to figure out how to do it, until I realized that this feeling I have is just a perceptive malfunction, caused as it might be by something wrong in the rods and cones of my eye. (And I know what caused it, but it's past mending now.) It isn't objectively real, any more than the black spots that swarm in the corner of my vision would be real, but equally it isn't going away. I accept that I'm as real as anyone else, even though I can *see* the sun shining through me as I walk among other people's solid and undeniable forms, and watch them do things that are utterly impossible for me, like getting together and having kids. So in a way it's a relief to find myself in unreal Tokyo, among people who seem as thin and insubstantial as myself. Maybe it's all illusion, but for once the external reality matches the internal one, which is a relief.

Someone told the 19th century writer Lafcadio Hearn to be sure to write a record of his first day in Japan, which he did, with memorable results. Lucky Hearne however didn't have to cope with jetlag. Most of us aren't even awake on our first day in Japan. But I think it's a good idea for gaijin to make a note of what struck them in their first months here, before they get too used to the custom, before 'Can you believe it?' turns into 'Yeah, so what?'

Like the special bike baskets made for carrying small dogs on their daily airings, equipped with special collar attached to the basket's rim to stop small dog from jumping out of said basket in pursuit of a canine friend going the other way on another bike.

Like the family bicycle: two year old up front, four-year-old in the rumble seat carrying the shopping bag, baby in a snuggly strapped to Mom's back, all happily tootling down the street, while the kamikaze high school students buzz past them on their bikes, some six-footer of a 17-year-old balanced gigantically on the rear axle flange (specially elongated for the purpose), or a middy-bloused girlfriend gracefully sidesaddle on the back carrier, holding down the flapping pleats of her blue serge skirt with one hand.

Like the vending machines and the umbrella racks outside stores on rainy days and the freebie packs of kleenex distributed by polite young ladies in front of the stations. Trust me, you'll miss them when you go home.

Like the disconcerting heart chorus of Irasshai's that greets you when you enter a store. If you've been taught that it's rude not to answer someone who speaks to you, it can take some time before you stop saying Irasshai back.

Going through drawers, looking for the poem Lorne sent me when I was in Tokyo on the anniversary of Richard's death. It was always somewhere there, and handy, but now I can't remember where I might have put it as a safe place here.

         We all love you, and we miss you, but
         perturbed spirit, rest.

I turn up stacks of photographs, my kids on last day, whose names I've forgotten, and adults whom I still remember (oh, so I do have a picture of Lisa after all) even if I liked the kids more. Ueno in cherry blossom season in the rain. Odd corners of Koenji in spring. Postcards from various art exhibits at various department stores, when and where mostly gone- screens and modern Japanese style painters. The usual memorabilia in which you encapsule a past. Then there are the files and envelopes of all my paperwork there- my monthly bills, my denki and suidou, my list of hours worked. Pointless masses of paper, but the trained historian part of me says I need them. Suppose memory tries to tell me I was in the countryside on a Tuesday in October 1992, I can look at my hours for that month and see if I was indeed not at my Tsukishima classes. That's the rational explanation, of course, but it's really more superstition. Those papers tell me it was real, real down to the niggly yen amounts. Those papers came in orangey envelopes full of 10,000 yen bills, my pay for the month. My pay went into the top right hand drawer of my desk, after putting aside x number of bills for rent and y number for utilities, each clipped together with a large paper clip. You see? I can't have those kinds of concrete details in my memory without having a physical object to inspire them.

Then I found the business part of the wallet I took to Japan with me, or maybe the wallet itself except memory insists I had the same beige pursy-looking thing from the late 80's until I came home, pretty much. This was a section of it, where one kept cards, rather uselessly because I kept my card elsewhere, and that must have been why I removed it. Removed it when I went home for Christmas in 1992, because I changed money at the airport and there the receipt is. Everything else inside dates from before that trip, various scraps of paper and meishi that I can sometimes identify and sometimes not.

A piece of paper with the names of two books and their authors written in pencil in clear kanji, with furigana added, is simple enough. Anma-san, my guarantor's father, gave me a translation of Touno Monogatari, and he was telling me the Japanese name for it. A yellow piece of paper with Naruhodo the World is from someone I'd been in japanese class with wanting me to tape these shows if I could find them for him. White slip of notepad paper with the address of the Japan Foundation, given to me by a woman I met in my first weeks at a dyke dinner. She seemed really interesting and I gave her my phone number, but when she tried to call me at my inn they said I wasn't there any more, and she didn't call again. I was very disheartened. I have a meishi for an architect, whom I can't remember at all, and for someone at Aoba International School, which might be the kindergarten that was willing to hire me in '92 except that the trains into Shibuya at rush hour was what I didn't want to cope with.

There's one from Richard, who was in my first two terms at Nichibei, easily remembered as Richard-and-Ramona his wife who gave the wonderful massages. There's the Saratoga Real Estate man, who got Jerry and Deana their wonderful place, but couldn't get me anything under 120,000 yen a month, in the few weeks I looked in the spring of '91. There's the map to One Lucky, the hole in the wall eatery where Kimi Ryokan's gaijin went for their set meals. One of whom, in spite of slight palsy in his right side, talked the owner into taking him on full-time, and cooked and served with the best of them. There's meishi of people I can't remember or place- Sarah Pratt who lived in Fussa, Dr. Joan M Chard who taught at Tokyo Woman's Christian Univeristy, a restaurant in Kunitachi (why?)

These are the flotsam, these are the little details that get forgotten first, and that get forgotten for good when your mind produces the Official History of what happened in 1992. These are the little things I'd like to save, the forgotten physical pieces of evidence that will sometimes call up a whole memory still fresh from the past; and they're precisely the things and the memories that disappear first.

C.J.Cherryh in one of her series has an alien race that has no concept of forgetting. They find it vaguely obscene and indecent that we do. I mostly agree with them- it's wrong, it should be stopped- though another part of me thinks that what our mind registers as transcendence is only a memory not fully recalled. Something I saw in the back garden at age five has fused the images of white cloud in an early morning blue sky behind a brown tree into a concentration of happiness. But if I could remember all the details of that morning, would the emotion of happiness still be there? If I could see in detail the dark narrowness of One Lucky and remember what I ate there every night I went and who was there and what I said, would the concept of One Lucky have the same instant flash of nostalgia, of concentrated memory- summer of '91, those hot nights, the beer and the tonkatsu and the Australians... as it does now?

Which left an hour or nearly that before class. I went to the kissa next door to the school and had their morning set. It was the usual kissa for an upscalish neighbourhood- over-stuffed banquettes in flowered brocadey material, square tables too small for anything but a coffee cup, tiny lamps with low wattage, the tables shoved close together so it was hard for a gaijin to get in and out gracefully. I was always hesitant about going in to places like that, not sure of either my welcome or my Japanese. And whether because it was an upscalish neighbourhood or because the proprietor was indeed wary of gaijin coming in, I never got the warm welcome I did in some other places. (Smile at the clients is shita-machi manners, and Yamanote types go for cool service.)

I had the two thick pieces of cottony toast and the cold hardboiled egg, wet in its shell, and the salad with creamy mayonnaise dressing (the Japanese love affair with mayonnaise, I tell you... They put it on pizza) and iced coffee. I looked at my homework, those xeroxed sheets of isolated grammar points, and I read my Japan Times, the thin English language newspaper always thin on news of substance as well. I remember the slight indigestion from the egg and the mayonnaise and the cream in the coffee, and the heavy-eyed feeling of not enough sleep, and the incipent stuffiness in my nose from the mould and whatever allergies happen in typhoon season, and the Japan Times in the low orangey lighting, and the feeling of Yes it's true I'm here I'm here in Japan. So that it seems odd, immensely odd to me here now, that outside in the grey greenness is only Toronto, and no kissas and iced coffee and crowds of early morning Japanese at all.

...I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn't lying
All the salty margueritas in Los Angeles, I'm gonna drink 'em up

And if California slides into the ocean
As the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill.

Stephen gave me a tape he'd made off two Warren Zevon CDs. 'I don't really care for him that much. You can have it.' Purely as an afterthought I dropped it in my bag when I left in May of '91. Desperadoes Under the Eaves is what I listened to almost exclusively those first weeks in Tokyo. It's the Kimi Ryokan where I was staying, and the crowd of loud Australians and Americans and Germans in the lounge, all here to find work and say what a weird place Japan was. It's the streets of west Ikebuk to and from the station, the cheap hostess bars and pachinko palaces and karaoke boxes in the brassy sun of city spring, the clutter and tackiness and the soul-killing dirt.

Don't the sun look angry through the trees
Don't the trees look like crucified thieves
Don't you feel like desperadoes under the eaves
Heaven help the one who leaves

It's the strangeness and the crowds and the difficulty of doing everything in my first days there- find places, find how to get there, find the right train going in the right direction to the right terminus, find the right exit from the right end of the right station and then find the right landmarks once down on the ground to get where I'm going to and then find what I want in the place itself. It's the heat and the tiredness and the despair and the tears. It's my little room at the end of the day with its tatami and its clean futon and its one lacquered table and its air conditioner giving you an hour's coolness for 100 yen. I hang my yukata over the wire-meshed window that cranks open, so as to filter the late afternoon glare, and lie on the cool tatami and put on my headphones.

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went Mmmm mmmm umm-umm umm-umm mmm
Mmm-mmm mmmmmh mmm mmm mmm-mmm, mmm-mmm umm...