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.