This Place for Bowing
Tokyo, Japan
Who was gently blowing on the nape of my neck?
Train in Tokyo |
To float aimlessly across the great urban sprawl that is Tokyo is to immerse oneself in the sublime. On the surface the city is a neon-womb of ambition, greed and consumerism. It’s a land of forty-two inch plasma screen televisions, mammoth billboards pumping out the latest JPop hits and computers so small and so powerful that even a techno-phobe would drool. However, dig deeper. Go beyond the smiling corporate hospitality, the bowing office ladies, the in-car entertainment systems that wouldn’t be out of place in a London concert hall, and a different Japan awaits.
Tokyo Oddities |
And yet, just to confuse me even more, and make me wonder what is really real and what is a facsimile of real life, there are the deeply rewarding and intense friendships that I have nurtured with some Japanese people. People who remember that seven years ago I liked a particularly obscure flavour of candy, and who will spend the day looking for a bag of it so that when I visit their home I am reassured that they remember who I am. These are the same people who think nothing of spending a king’s ransom on lunch for me just so I can lean back, pat my stomach and feel genuinely content; people who give up their lives when I am in town to make sure that though I am alone, I am never lonely; people who send me letters which say things like: “Please come back soon and catalyse our joy,” or, “I think longingly about your son, I miss his body-heat.”
Tokyo City Sights |
And as I wander from noodle stall to pachinko parlour to love hotel to sleazy, dingy bar full of puffy faced workers whose dreams seem never to encroach onto their normal day-to-day lives, I try to understand. Yet no matter how much I study Japanese, read their writers, follow their music, politics and sport I never fully feel at home. You may visit this land, but don’t get too comfortable. Spectre-like, you pass through the metropolis absorbing its sights, sounds and smells but the metropolis, in return, never embraces you. Tokyo is a cruel mistress.
Tokyo Sign |
About the Author
Philip Blazdell has been travelling for the last fifteen years and would like to stop now, thank you very much. His travels began when he followed a girl in nice purple pyjamas to Istanbul and got into all kinds of trouble with her parents. Despite marriage proposals in Las Vegas, arrests in Germany, and lust in the dust in more than one third-world shit hole, he has never looked back. Well, not that much really.
Philip currently divides his time between his home in Middle England, SFO International Airport and some grotty little town in the Netherlands that is best not spoken about in polite company. He constantly worries about using the word ‘awesome’ too much whilst in the USA and dreams of a day when he can go a whole day without resorting to Diet Coke. His greatest ambition is to raise his son to be a much better person than himself and to see Liverpool string a run of wins together. At least one of those, he believes, is possible. He can be contacted, when not bouncing around the world at 32,000
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