When I first came to Tokyo in 2008 and it felt like heaven on earth to me. I was far from what you’d call an otaku (or a weeaboo, as one friend calls it), and I was starkly against participating in the fetishization of Asia that I’ve encountered in the States. Exotic was never a part of my vocabulary.
Yes, the quirky toys in the gatcha gatcha machine, the ridiculous advertisements and the dense streets overflowing with sensory input…those were cool and all, but they weren’t what made me fall in love.
The food, the endless supply of interesting media, the contrast between traditional and modern that the west loves to overanalyze, it gave me a lot to explore, which was exciting for someone who was eager to practice the language. I vowed never to speak English in social situations unless I had to, and so every single interaction became a learning experience for me. This may have kept me here longer than my initial plan of two years, but it wasn’t what made Tokyo feel like home to me.
It was the cafes and local businesses.
In 2008, we weren’t accustomed to checking our phones constantly. The Iphone had just come out and Japan is always slow to adapt to change so most people were not that emotionally invested in the world that their flip phones presented them with.
Japanese phones had television services and the internet before smartphones but they were clunky and usually used in case of an emergency or a long train ride. No one was glued the same way they are today.
Things weren’t THAT different from they are today, but they were different enough. We weren’t always present in a spiritual sense, but we were much more engaged with our five senses and the world around us.
I was rabidly devouring all the information I could find, hunting for gold in the maze of dense mazes that make up Tokyo, trying absolutely everything, every dish, every station, every place I could find that served lunch.
In Tokyo lunch is usually cheaper than dinner. Most people drink alcohol with dinner and so lunch is seen as a way to turn more people into regular customers. Lunch sets (free drinks and side dishes with the meal) are just common sense here, not only in the drinking spots but everywhere.
I’d go into local shops and it wasn’t uncommon for an elderly shop keeper or a young couple to start a conversation with me. Foreigners were not incredibly rare but they gave people a natural conversation starter which is important in a country where everyone is constantly worried about making other people uncomfortable.
This made it incredibly easy to talk to people in a daytime cafe or a bar during lunch hours.
Locals talked with each other too, even if it took more time for them to make the move and start a conversation. After going somewhere three or four times you’d start to recognize other customers and could make friends with them, or at least get to know them enough so that you felt welcome.
At one cafe near my apartment, I befriended a woman in her 50’s and spent hours talking with her about cultural nuances, politics, spirituality and everything else under the sun. She became a close friend of mine, although I only ever met her in the shop. She introduced me to as many people as she could, knowing that I was new in town and trying to get better at Japanese.
On my excursions to every corner of the city, I discovered a neighborhood full to the brim with these kinds of local shops, a place many people who have spent time in Tokyo talk about today, but for someone who has lived its history, it feels like a hollow shell of it’s former self., I’ll let you guess where.
I became an addict.
I’d eat rice balls for dinner half the time so I could afford to eat out the rest of the time. I wanted to know every single shop and find the community that suited me best. I wanted to introduce these communities to each other and help everyone I knew move around more easily in the community. Every day I was on a mission to strengthen my ties with a shop owner I liked or discover something or someone new.
The world felt welcoming.
When the world is closed and cold, you feel stuck. Don’t like your friends? That’s rough. Hate your job? Deal with it. Difficult parents? Sucks.
Being surrounded by so many different communities means there are possibilities everywhere. There are new friends to make, information about job opportunities, low pressure environments where you can explore ideas face to face. It’s a fucking beautiful thing for anyone to experience. For someone who came from the depths of suburbia, where kids hang out outside the movie theater and 7-11 and adults see the same people every day, it was heaven on earth.
For the first time in my life, I felt I had a home.
Now it’s 2024, and there are still spots like this, but it’s a very different scene….
(To be continued)
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mhhhhmmmm, you describe so well the excitement of being a foreigner who has the will to integrate. it affords opportunity to spread light and positivity wherever we go because people like to interact with the oddone that obviously doesn't come from here.
being back in germany has shown this contrast for me. i miss walking around in other countries in europe. not so that i can feel special, but rather 1. that my presence can gift others an opportunity to say hi and 2. that the same old mindfucks of my home country simply don't exist in other countries. it feels like a bad spell has been lifted, and i'd much rather take on the local challenges than the tired old ons from my former home that still exist as forcefully as ever.
blessings to japan <3
it’s strange how the “mindfucks” from our home country can be so much more intolerable than the ones from abroad. Perhaps it’s just not having the micro trauma of dealing with them daily as a child.
What’s your situation now? Always glad to hear from you!
right? we get that here a lot now.
ana and me are back in germany fixing he van up after 4.5 years on the road. and life here is a mixture of an odd caricature, and a sad movie lost in translation.
but we feel little resonance now, nor one way nor another. we just have lost the relation to the old "mindfuck" and we feel changed and grateful. so whenever that happened, 4.5 years did the trick somehow and we now see it in contrast.
found a nice housesit over winter, in italy, we'll probably write about it. we're super grateful for it. we will do anything we can to devote this winter to our arts as much as we can. o want to finally make an album, or at least an ep i am proud of. no better time than now i feel. world is steering to the peak of its mayhem and confusion and we are ready to adapt to what life wants from us as our farm home quest has not turned out successful.
i am stoked i finally got peakd access on my mobile. i had lost interest in hive on ecency as my feed is full of stuff i don't care about and i hardly ever see you guys on it, just the noise you know. put my small do-care group in a custom list on peakd and now i feel eager to come online more again and interact, as my feed is now shorter than the number of hours in a day ;)
it is good to see ya again and the few others.
blessings zack
There are probably worse things to be addicted to XD
Like eating entire boxes of cookies in a single sitting? 🤐
Yeh like that.
So, have you been in Tokyo since 2008?? Have you ever lived other than Tokyo??
!wine
I was in Osaka for two months before taking a 6 year break from Japan 2012-2018. And Saitama for 3 years but Tokyo-Saitama