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.

Life Is in the Details

When you move to a new country half way across the world, there are a lot of big things you could write about. But thinking back on our first days in Tokyo, the small things paint the truest picture of how daily life has changed for us.

Instant gratification is no longer available, which takes getting used to. There’s no more hopping in the car whenever we need to get somewhere or buy something. We walk and take the subway, which is fine – we like walking and the trains are clean, air conditioned and actually run on a schedule. However, Tokyo is a very large city so getting where we need to go can sometimes take a while. Going to the doctor, for example, isn’t a matter of driving 10 minutes and arriving. We have to plan on 45 minutes to an hour each way. Even if we took our car, it wouldn’t help much because there are so many cars on such narrow roads with so many stop lights that driving takes almost as long (and the stress of it could take years off your life). Bottom line: We can’t get as much done in a day. We’ve adjusted our expectations accordingly and find the slower pace rather enjoyable.

Communication is obviously more complicated for us now, given we don’t speak the language and can’t read it either. What I didn’t know and wouldn’t have guessed is that not being able to read is by far the worse handicap of the two. You’d be surprised how far pointing at things and simple pantomimes can get you, but when it comes to reading there’s no way to cheat. There are three Japanese script types commonly used – one of them with 2,000 “basic” characters – so we don’t expect an improvement in our ability to read what’s around us anytime soon. We receive bills and can see how much is due, but have no idea who we’re paying. We have some lovely new appliances, but aren’t sure how to use them.

For example, our Japanese microwave has control buttons labeled in – of course – Japanese writing. If you bought a new microwave in, say, France, you could use a dictionary to find out what the words on the control panel mean because you’d be able to identify the letters. Here, despite 30-odd years of experience using microwaves, I’m left wondering whether pushing the big yellow button will cause the microwave to self destruct, or cook my popcorn to perfection (I burned the popcorn, but the microwave is still intact). One night, Mark decided to try a new button and ended up “browning” a dish with a plastic lid, effectively shellacking our take-out.

Milk is another seemingly small detail that looms large for us. After a few visits to various grocery stores, we decoded the numbers on the nutrition panels to the point where we can identify cartons that hold fat-free milk, the only kind Conor and Stig will drink. A wise American I met advised me to buy only cartons featuring a picture of a cow because she once ended up with goat’s milk, which her kids didn’t appreciate.

So if you find yourself thinking of me and wondering what I’m up to, rest assured I’m busy celebrating my latest triumph – guessing correctly how to change the filter on my new (absolutely awesome by the way) vacuum cleaner, or successfully purchasing stamps at my local post office – and thinking of you.