Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Pleasures of Invisibility

It’s fun being a foreigner in Tokyo. Expectations of your behavior are greatly reduced. In fact, no one pays much attention to you at all. There have only been a few times in three months when I felt even remotely self conscious. The first that comes to mind is when I wore denim shorts out and about town on a steamy hot August day. Not that anyone was looking at me strangely (Tokyoites generally avoid looking at people they don’t know – strangely or otherwise), but I couldn’t help noticing that Japanese women in shorts were few and far between and not one looked a day older than 20. Those women who were be-shorted seemed intent on showing the world exactly why this article of clothing is called “shorts”. They were also wearing high heels, stockings and fashionable tops, rather than a t-shirt and flip-flops.

It’s difficult not to feel self conscious when you trigger alarms trying to exit a subway station. Subway turnstiles are electronic and kept in the open position to maximize the speed with which masses of people can pass through them. You simply hold your subway pass card up to the scanner (or insert your ticket) as you enter the turnstile. If there’s a problem, an alarm sounds and a barrier bar is triggered that prevents you from exiting. The unexpected stop in forward movement really annoys the people behind you (of which there are always plenty) because they have to take sudden evasive action to avoid becoming part of a multi-person pileup. As the cause of the blockage, you can only hope they’re paying attention instead of texting while they walk, which is surprisingly common in this crowded city.

Ironically, you can get into a station with a pass card that’s on the brink of being worthless for lack of funding, but you can’t easily get out again: The machines used to add money to your card are located outside the turnstiles.

When I found myself in this situation, I was able to show Japanese commuters in the vicinity exactly why they do hold relatively low expectations for intelligent behavior on the part of foreigners. Once everyone behind me had peeled over to other turnstiles, I turned around and decided to try exiting through a different turnstile myself – as though something must be wrong with that particular one (even though as soon as I was out of the way, normal traffic resumed straight through it). The second turnstile I tried was adjacent to a window with a subway employee behind it. When, predictably, the alarm sounded and the gates again closed off my escape, I simply showed him my pass card and said in English, “For some reason my Passmo isn’t working.” He just waved me through without bothering to collect the fare shortage. I was disrupting the flow of turnstile traffic, which is apparently worse than not paying the full fare. Here in Tokyo, an offense to efficiency is an offense indeed.

On such occasions, you realize that rather than sticking out like a sore thumb, as a foreigner in Tokyo you are in fact virtually invisible and free to blunder on in the comfort of your own anonymity. It’s quite liberating.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Noise Capital of the World


Tokyo seems to be either very quiet or incredibly noisy. Our neighborhood is very quiet. We’re lucky enough to be located across the street from a park, so we sometimes hear children playing and young baseball teams chanting musically as they run laps around the perimeter. We also “enjoy” the background hum of some type of cicada that sounds like electric current gone wild. The occasional truck rumbles past, which makes the house shake but is not terribly noisy.

On the other hand Shibuya, the big commercial center in our ward (Tokyo is divided into 23 wards), is noisy beyond anything I’ve ever encountered anywhere. In Shibuya, the air itself is loud – I swear.

One day in early August, Mark and I stood in the center of Shibuya laden with bags of groceries and various items for our new household. As we stood sweating and waiting for the boys to catch up, we were a captive audience for the cacophony of voices and music coming simultaneously and discordantly from every direction. The combination of extreme humidity and uber stimulation made my brain feel like it was melting.

The main intersection in Shibuya is the biggest in the world. It’s about the size of Times Square times six, with five roads fanning out from the center like starlight. Giant video screens on the sides of surrounding buildings blast out programming to everyone in the vicinity (which is a multitude if I ever saw one). More immediately, voices from the shops and restaurants that line the street we’re on exhort us to buy what they’re selling – at least that’s what we assume.

We’re directly in front of a multi-story electronics store, from which a plethora of sounds is emanating. A female voice being broadcast over speakers keeps up a continuous stream of words in a rather demanding tone. Simultaneously, several males standing in front of the same store try to entice passersby, but more timidly – perhaps because they can actually be seen. In addition, two different sets of music are being piped outdoors at incredible decibels. Their strategy is working, although perhaps not in the way they intended, because I’m tempted to enter the store if only to escape all the noise on the sidewalk.

When in Shibuya, we try to “go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence” (Max Ehrman), but we’re so distracted by all the noise and haste that we can’t remember much of anything. That may be just as well – going placidly on a crowded Shibuya sidewalk is one sure way to get absolutely nowhere.