Life in Japan

My mother moved to Tokyo in 1962 and was one of the very few gaijin (foreigners) to live there at the time. She had been living in Hawaii and thought it’d be fun to move to Japan! She was 20 years old. The best part was how she went about it: she wrote a short bio of herself and asked if there were any host families willing to put her up. Then she sent that off to three popular Japanese magazines. A few weeks later (no internet in 1962:) the replies started coming in…there were over 400 of them. She and her mother, my grandmother, went through them all, trying to decide which family looked the best. They eventually chose the letter written by a senior member of the Japanese parliament, called the Diet.
It took almost two months for her to sail from the west coast of the United States (even though she was a resident of Hawaii, she was a student at the University of Oregon at the time) to Japan, where she docked in Yokohama. Her new host family met her there and they drove back to Tokyo. I guess they weren’t very nice, however; the father tried to molest her one evening and she ran away to go live with the family of a friend she’d just met, named Michiko. They lived in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo.
She lived with Michiko’s family for two years and became fluent not only in the Japanese language but in their culture and cooking as well.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of eating some of the unique dinners she made for us; we were one of the few families in Philadelphia (where I grew up) to have miso soup at least once a week! I never really thought much of the influence this would have until the opportunity to move to Tokyo fell into my lap during the autumn of 1997. I lived there, off and on, until 2001. Every year since I’ve made at least one return trip there; it’s kind of my muse, I guess.
Even though I lived in Tokyo I was able to travel extensively throughout the country with my JR passes (Japanese Railway). I had 9 weeks’ worth of these passes and went everywhere I could, all over the main island of Honshu (which is home to Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagano, to name a few) to the islands of Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku. These passes are only available to foreigners, and can only be purchased outside of Japan, which is too bad because it’s such a cheap way to travel! A friend of mine, Aki, who was born and raised in Tokyo, was amazed at all the places I visited; she’d never been to any of them; it was too expensive. I can still remember traveling with her and her boyfriend, Kaz, up to the small, picturesque town of Nikko, some two hours north of Tokyo. They’d never been there before and I’d just returned from a day trip the week before. It felt odd for me to be playing tour guide to two Japanese nationals.
I used to make day trips to Kyoto once a week, leaving Tokyo Station early in the morning on the shinkansen and arriving in Kyoto about two hours later. I can still remember my first visit there: I knew no Japanese and didn’t have a map. My friend Kaz, who lived and worked in Tokyo, was a little surprised when I called him from a borrowed cell phone and asked him to ask the cell phone’s owner how to get to the main temple areas. Kaz did as I asked, however, then got back on the phone with me to tell me in English which bus to take. I must say, his English is so good I thought he was American when I first met him. He went to college in Texas and perfected his accent to the point that, upon returning to Japan, he was able to get out of a speeding ticket by telling the traffic cop he was American, not Japanese; he even showed him his old Texas drivers license. Man.
On the way back from one of those trips to Kyoto I thought I’d get some lunch from the snack car. Again, this was early on in my Japanese experience and I didn’t speak a word of the language (let alone understand any of the kanji). I looked around the snack area, trying to figure out what everything was from the pictures on the box covers. I saw one that had a drawing of a fisherman on it and thought it must be seafood so I bought it, along with a can of Coke, and returned to my seat. The guy sitting next to me looked at me a little funny when I set the box down on my lunch tray and got out my chopsticks. I opened the box to see what culinary delights awaited me, very proud of myself for getting my own meal without having had to call Kaz, and was shocked to find I had bought a box of candy. Not the best thing for lunch (especially with a Coke), but I proceeded to dig in, acting like of course I had bought it on purpose. My seat mate simply turned his head and went back to reading his paper.
That little anecdote typifies my life in Japan. For the most part I was just winging it, trying to get by and learn as I went. Sometimes, after picking up a little Japanese, I would ask for help but this often led to frustration, as I wasn’t able to understand the answers! But what fun it was. I was very lucky to have spent my first 6 months there doing nothing but traveling, with a home base in Tokyo that was paid for by my ex-wife’s company (she was living there and we were trying to reconcile; that’s why I moved there in the first place).
When I struck out on my own, moving to a little shit hole of an apartment in the Gyotoku area of Tokyo, it was very different. I had no time to travel and my new work visa prevented me from getting any more JR passes anyway. I was simply another suit riding the train from one place to the next, running when the crowd ran, walking when they walked. I can still recall being shoved into the subway during rush hour by old men who were paid to do just that: push us in until there was enough space for the doors to close. They had these big tools to do it, too; they were like giant brooms but instead of bristles on the end they had wide, concave-shaped boards.
The food was great and the people were great and I spent all my free time (when I wasn’t teaching, which is how I managed to stay in the country) wandering around old Tokyo neighborhoods, trying not to just patronize the same old places over and over. My work visa status had to be renewed every now and then and so I’d fly to Korea for the weekend, then come back and get a new stamp in my passport. I also managed to use Japan as my home base for all of Asia and was able to visit not only Korea but China, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, etc.
I made my last trip there this past November, as a stopover on my way back from a wedding I’d booked in Hong Kong. A lot has changed but I was glad to find I could still navigate the subway like a local…

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Tags:

asia, ex, japan, kyoto, pat, tokyo and travel