Japan Diary #5: Taking the Shinkansen

     KUMAMOTO— I flew over on one of the new Boeing 787s, and while I appreciated the accommodate-the-human-body-and-not-a-centimeter-more seating layout in economy, I was not awed. Even though you had all sorts of technology at your fingertips: the metrics the pilot was seeing, the clipping along airspeed—550 miles per hour. The fact that you were flying six miles up and it was 40 degrees below zero outside, a few feet to the left. 

     So interested, satisfied even. But not thrilled, not in the little boy giddy, look-what-humans-can-do way of seeing the Shinkansen bullet train pull up at Tokyo Station, of dragging my luggage above, nestling into seat, setting out my lunch, and soon clipping along at 174 miles an hour. 
     I wish I could explain to you how Japan, whose sclerotic economy has been in the toilet for the past 20 years, can maintain this national system of sleek electric trains, while the United States of America, self-proclaimed greatest country in not just the world but the known universe too, at least according to Republican presidential candidates, can barely field Amtrak, a wheezing tortoise slowed by pain meds. I've been on more than one Amtrak train, back in the day when I would still climb aboard, where the delay was longer than the trip itself. 
     We could never even board the trains the way they do here.
     "They're never going to make it," my brother says, as we stood on the platform. The digital clock reads 12:54. Our tickets say the train is to leave at 12:59. The train isn't even there yet.
     A whoosh of activity. Train rushes up, doors slide open, passengers stumble out, then others hurry aboard. A pause, then the train, all electric, takes off like a silent shot, sliding faster and faster. I check my cell phone: "12:59," turn it so he can see.
     "There goes that theory," he says. 

    This has not been an entirely happy trip. In part because of a jet lag that never went away: many hours staring at the ceiling. But the closest I got to joy was sitting on the Shinkansen, digging into a very good box lunch, pulling on an Orangina, watching Japan flash by. The nerve-shredded, exhausted gloom lifted, for a while.
     Another moment was arriving at Kumamoto, the city in southwestern Japan. I'm here for the birthday party of Kumamon, the town's mascot, a Quixotic quest that should leave me giddy, but doesn't. 
      The Kumamoto platform was completely bare of the bear decorations I half expected. No banners, no posters, no photos of birthday cake.
      "Wouldn't it be something if I had the wrong weekend?" I thought, darkly, on the escalator, going down. "Maybe there won't be any hoopla at all."
     At that moment I caught a glimpse of the giant head waiting below.

Japan Diary #4: More to it than just that bomb

     Hiroshima is a fun town.
     That will sound odd, almost sacrilegious to those who know just one thing about the 1oth largest city in Japan: that the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped on it at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
     But there's more to it than that.
     I admit I was one of those The Place The Bomb Dropped people. Ten minutes after I dropped my bags at the RIHGA Royal Hotel (big, swank, with pillbox-capped bellhops muscling your bags into your room) I was hot-footing over to the Atomic Dome. 
      Like most iconic images you've seen all your life,  the building looked smaller than it had loomed in imagination. Just the shell of a small building,  a 1920s trade hall made eerie by having Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped from the belly of the Enola Gay,explode 600 yards above it, so that the blast came straight down and the walls were preserved. 
     But after that, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, some of the quietest room I ever walked through, jarring photos and melted glass bottles presented with a musty 1950a repetition and lack of modern curatorial verve. Lots of burned uniforms of middle school students—so many so it seemed a form of special pleading, as though to emphasize their own innocence; though I did note, with grim satisfaction, that one placard actually mentioned that Japan started the war, a rare bit of historical lucidity in a country often myopic to its own past crimes.  

 But touring the museum took 30 minutes. And then what? Turns out, there's great shopping in Hiroshima: which boasts an endless expanse of outdoor mall, with arching glass ceilings and colorful lights. There were candy shops and stationery shops, bookstores, department stores. My wife had expressed interest in fabric, and I popped into a kimono shop, where the roll of flowered cloth I thought would look nice on our wall cost only $2,500—or would, for someone who could afford to buy it. It was so beautiful I squinted and tried to imagine that maybe it would be a noble husbandly gesture to buy the thing, and only the thought of my wife being forced to murder me when I came home and bury the body where it would never be found stayed my hand.  

      My brother, who is traveling with me, and I paused in front of a place offering oysters, and considered a pre=dinner snack. But then we noticed the place served "whale bacon" for 720 yen, and while curiosity made us take one step toward the place, moral revulsion made us decide we didn't want to patronize them at all, not even for oysters. A good call, as we found a branch of Ohsho, whose ethereal gyoza have ruined the crescent-shaped dumpling for me anyplace else. For dinner, my brother insisted we try something called okanomayaki, a local favorite that looked to me like glop: noodles and seafood and egg and barbecue sauce all mashed up on a grill. I resisted at first, but he prevailed. 

Okanomayaki,

    "Rarely do I have the chance to introduce someone as worldly as you to the a new food experience," he said, buttering me up. It worked. The stuff was great: Fumichan is the name of restaurant, if you ever get out this way. 
     Heading back to our hotel, we raved about how refreshing Hiroshima was after the dense chaos of Tokyo, and my brother paid Hiroshima the ultimate honor.
    "It's like Chicago," he said. 

Japan Diary #3 — Tokyo Subway

     Chicago has some 2.7 million people, using 102 miles of its L subway system.
     Tokyo has 13.8 million people and 121 miles of metro subway. 
     Do the math: five times the population using just 20 percent more track. It gets crowded. 
     Hurrying through the maze of stations, trying to get to the right line, the right track, is like being in an M.C. Escher etching come to life, with surreal masses of people flying in all directions, platoons fleeing up and down stairs, ramps, escalators. If I looked up and saw mobs pounding across the ceiling and walls it could hardly seem more otherworldly.

      It was amazing that no one seemed to be slamming into each other, yet somehow all the hurrying commuters slid around one another. 
     On the platforms, people form lines behind where the doors will open, and while I didn't see any of the famous "pushers" who used to jam people into the trains, I could see the reason they'd be employed. 
      About 100 people a year in Tokyo die by falling in front of subway trains, usually after drinking, and to try to cut that toll, a number of stations I visited had an impressive automatic gate system, where the track is completely walled off from the platform, with doors that slide apart a moment before the train doors open. 

     Other cities around the world have them—Paris is another—but American metropolitan governments don't find them worth the $ 1 million or so they cost for each station. Though about 50 people a year die in New York, putting it roughly on par with Tokyo, the idea of barriers there was dismissed.
    The Tokyo subway also has "Women only" cars, designated by pink signs, for women who want to ride the subway without being fondled by chikan, or "gropers." But only during the morning rush hour. I'd say we don't have those on the Chicago "L" because they're not necessary, but I can't state that with any authority. 

Japan Diary # 2: Rain

Imperial Palace grounds.

     TOKYO —The plan was to start Monday touring the city's Harajuku district, talking to the Lolita goths and costumed cosplay kids who hang around the bridge there about Japanese concepts of cuteness, for my article. 
    But it rained. The weather report had said, "Scattered Showers," but they never scattered. They stayed together, pelting down hard, all day. Really, it was like the opening scene of "Rashomon."
     So Plan B. I walked around the Imperial Palace, waiting for the rain to stop.  The place was utterly deserted, such a contrast to the unbelievable density of the Tokyo subway. Then, when I realized the rain wasn't letting up, I gave Harajuku my best shot but, it was raining, there too, and while there were shoppers, the street scene folk who usually enliven the landscape were staying dry. 
     Across the bridge is the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and since I was standing in front of the entrance, I took refuge there, and toured its gardens, contemplating my mission. I was rewarded with a conversation with a pair of garden guards about yuru-kyara—the official mascots I'm writing about—that helped focus my thinking on the subject.
    By 2 p.m., after ... eight full hours walking in the rain, with another few to go before it let up, I was steaming up my glasses over a bowl of hot ramen. I'm not sure whether it was the best ramen I've ever eaten, or merely the most appreciated. But either way, it brought me back to the room. I only slept an hour last night -- even though I had only slept an hour on the plane, my body still thought it was 12 noon, not 2 a.m. So a nap seems in order. 

Japan Diary #1: How about some pig's rectum with that?

     TOKYO—It's been so long that I've sat among smokers at dinner that I forgot that, in Japan, it's still a thing. It didn't bother me before, so didn't bother me now at this Yakitori bar in the Kabukichan area of Tokyo. In fact, it sort of added to the I'm-in-a-foreign-place vibe, to be among young people puffing away. The food was still good, hot from the brazier, impaled on flimsy wooden stick.s. I had all sorts of skewers — tomatoes wrapped in bacon, grilled asparagas with chicken, pork belly—I drew the line at the more exotic fare, such as sparrow, or pig's rectum. The drink to the left is a Nippon soda, which comes with a clump of ginger, and I found it tasty, in a gingery kind of way.

   The whole trip to Japan has been very low key. The flight, on a new American Airlines 787, was filled but not crowded or hellish. I slept for an hour, which gave me energy to last until ... well, it's nearly 10 p.m. now, or 7 a.m. Chicago time. I don't feel exhausted or jet lagged or anything. Maybe that's tomorrow. 
    If you look at the menu below, you'll see it's fairly cheap—110 yen make a dollar. The hotel is very small, but clean and modern and inviting, and also inexpensive; it set me back $80, a reminder that Japan has been in recession for a long, long time.
     Okay, the last thoughts in my head have drained out. A shower and sleep. 
     If you want something to discuss, consider one reason the Japanese economy is in such trouble is their population is dwindling—the place looked empty on the train from Narita, though it got denser quickly as we approached central Tokyo. It has no border with Mexico and far fewer immigrants (though much more signage, not only in English, but Chinese and Korean than when last I was here, so the place is certainly more multi-cultural). Remember that being anti-immigrant is not only morally wrong, but it's economically disastrous too. G'night.  
      
     

Japan is a strange place

Samuri armor, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

     About 2 a.m. Sunday, Chicago time, I'll be stepping off a plane at Narita airport in Tokyo, if all goes as planned. I decided, since I dredged up old columns on LA for my trip to Los Angeles last month, I shouldn't almost immediately subject you to a week of that regarding Japan, and would try to provide some fresh reporting in real time. But travel and jet lag being what they are, I thought, until I can get myself situated and both experience something noteworthy and find the opportunity to tell you about it, not to mention a Wi-Fi connection, that I'd set the scene with some thoughts from my last visit to Japan, a quarter century ago.

     The army of reporters swarming over Nagano, dazzled by the Olympic glare, seems to have lost sight of one noteworthy aspect of Japan: It is a tremendously strange place.
     Not to the Japanese, I'm sure. They grew up there. They're used to it.
     But to Western eyes — all right, to this Westerner's eyes at least — spending even a brief time in Japan, a few years back, was enough to fix it in my mind forever as somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shangri-La.
     For instance: umbrella condoms. That's certainly not what they are called there, but that's what I called them. You go into a department store and there are huge rolls of long plastic sheaths designed to slip over your wet umbrella so as not to cause inconvenience while you shop.
     In the places without umbrella condoms, there was something even odder: big umbrella racks. People would leave their umbrellas at the front of the store, with a reasonable assurance that the umbrellas would be there when they returned. Strange, right? Like believing in the tooth fairy. They did the same thing with their shoes at the entrances to temples and certain restaurants. In my country, that practice would result in a lot of barefoot, angry people.
     Frankly, I got the impression that in Japan they could have numbered cubbyholes at the entrances of stores for people to place their wallets in — so the store could rub oil into the leather, or polish the credit cards — and not only would people do it, but the wallets would be there when they got back.
     Some of the weirdness was close to genius. I have deep, sincere admiration for Japanese bathrooms. Many are modular units — the entire room molded out of a single piece of fiberglass. Some toilets have the sink built into the toilet tank. When you flush, a spout of water automatically fills the sink, which drains into the tank. It's very clever; no dirty faucet handles to touch, and the water used washing your hands is then used to flush the toilet later.
     The system seems even more sophisticated when you realize that nearly every other toilet in Asia is a hole in the floor between two footpads.
     Not in Japan. In Japan, taxicabs have a mechanical device that allows the white-gloved driver to fling the rear door open for you, so you don't have to undergo the agony of touching something as dubious as a public vehicle's door handle. Not that I could afford to take a taxi in Japan, but the concept is still admirable, nevertheless.
     There is also something called Tokyo Tower, a giant television tower about the same configuration as the Eiffel Tower, but several times larger and painted orange (again, strange). Go to the top of Tokyo Tower, and you can see the entire city, though God knows why you'd want to, because Tokyo is a cluttered agglomeration of charmless architecture that looks like 100 downtown Dallases assembled together in a 10-by-10 grid.
     In Japan, they have graveyards for fetuses. I happened upon one next to Tokyo Tower. Each grave had a tiny stone statue of a baby. The mothers would knit little caps and bibs for the stone babies, and stick toy pinwheels next to them. Poignant. When the wind picked up, all these pinwheels started going. It was eerie, particularly when I got a translation of some of the messages that had been left at the graves. For example, people who were feeling guilty about an abortion wrote something like "Dear Baby — we're awfully sorry about this. Forgive us . . ." Supposedly the buddhist monks who run the place make a fortune.
     Service is big in Japan. That's one of its best features. Whenever I buy something in a store in Chicago and observe the listless clerk deigning to ring up the sale and fling my purchase in my general direction, I think about how they do things in Japan. I once saw a Japanese clerk run — run — to get an item for me. I stayed at a resort where dinner was brought by a woman in a kimono who crawled into the room on her knees, carrying the food on a lacquered tray. Try finding that at a Sheraton.
     I was in Japan to visit my brother, who worked at a firm there. And the oddest thing of all was something my brother's boss did. He arranged to take me out for a drink. It struck me as unusual, but I was game and went along. (Japan is a drinker's paradise. They sell bottles of scotch from vending machines on train station platforms).
     We sat in a hotel lobby, he, smoking away (everybody smokes there), me, perched on the edge of my seat, wondering what this all was about.
     As it turned out, he just wanted to get to know me. See what kind of family his employee came from. Determine whether I was on a mission to bring my brother home. Just a concerned, friendly employer looking out for the best interests of his company and his people.
     Weird, right?

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 1998

Busy

     So, I said to my wife, sitting at a casual lunch at Roti on Randolph Street in Chicago one day last week: the trouble is, between fact-checking the galleys and writing the columns and the blog posts and getting ready for my trip, I just can't get a week's worth of posts ready ahead of time for Every goddamn day while I'm away.
    "So leave it blank," she said, in the tone someone would say, "Today is Tuesday."
    But, I continued, there's the promise implicit in "Every goddam day..."
    "'Every goddamn day' is a metaphor!" she almost shouted. "For life! The relentlessness of life. Not that you have to write every goddamn day..."
     Easy for her to say. She's not the one who has to watch the online trolls dancing in a joyous conga line around you, laughing and pointing. Or, worse, realizing that no one notices or cares. So my plan is to write from the road, or the airport, or train station, to keep you posted on my travels.
    Assuming it's possible. Japan is far away. Maybe their Wi-Fi won't like my laptop.
    Anyway, another busy day yesterday, between working on an advance column for the paper, proofing my galleys and getting ready for the trip, and today was the first day in two and a half years where I woke up and realized I had entirely forgotten about the blog. But I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. I do have a promise to keep.  So here you go. I'll check in from Japan tomorrow, if I can.