My friend Tom, who was studying Japanese at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, suggested I look into the summer course offered at International Christian University (ICU) in suburban Tokyo. The summer course at ICU lasted six weeks from the start of July through mid-August, and I took advantage of the French proclivity for extended vacations to head off to Tokyo.
I had really no presuppositions or expectations in visiting Japan for the first time – I simply liked to see different places and learn languages, and was far too busy with other school work and working in the restaurant to spend a bunch of time reading travel guides, an activity I associated with mere tourists and found to be inappropriate for street-savvy, worldly traveler such as myself. So I basically worked my ass off right up until the day of my flight and then hopped on the plane with every intention of returning to work at Le Bec-Fin six weeks later.
The plane ride to Japan is long, 16 hours long from New York’s JFK to Narita non-stop, which seems more like 16 days when you’re crammed into a coach-class seat. One of my co-workers had lent me Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which I read when I wasn’t trying to sleep or fidgeting in my chair.
When we were a few hours from Japan, the young Japanese woman next to me, who had spent the previous twelve hours asleep, woke up and began to tell me about the time she had spent living in New York and working as a waitress. Part of my strong desire to avoid anything that seemed tourist-like was to not make hotel reservations, and after I revealed this to my newly acquainted travel companion, Yasuko, she seemed concerned and offered to help me locate appropriate lodging.
The most annoying thing about travelling from the US to Tokyo is that Tokyo Narita International Airport is not located in Tokyo but in Narita, an hour and a half from Tokyo in neighboring Chiba Prefecture. So after spending what seemed like an eternity on the airplane you still have a long, albeit picturesque train ride through the rice paddies and hamlets of rural Japan waiting for you.
I don’t recall talking with Yasuko all that much on the train ride into Tokyo – I think I ordered a soda from the refreshment cart pushed by a young, attractive Japanese woman who perambulated through the train cars hawking her wares in the flawless honorific falsetto that characterizes Japanese customer service, packed my last remaining bit of Skoal, and enjoyed the feeling of the warm afternoon sun, the slow release of nicotine into my bloodstream and the tingling anticipation of spending the next six weeks in a new country.
When taking the Narita Express into Tokyo, there is a good chance that you will get off in Shinjuku, one of the “wards” of Tokyo, somewhat analogous to the five boroughs of New York except that each is essentially a city center unto itself, so there is not one, but rather many “downtown” Tokyos, and there are many more than five wards, 23 to be exact. Shinjuku is one of the most congested, most heavily populated of the wards, and Shinjuku Station, where we would finally be alighting from the Narita Express, is the world’s busiest train station.
There are around 30 platforms servicing even more individual lines at Shinjuku Station, close to a hundred small shops selling everything from young women’s clothing to bargain travel packages to bowls of udon noodles sold through “food ticket” machines which dispense tickets corresponding to the picture of the food indicated on each of the machine’s buttons, which are then passed to a shop attendant over a counter onto which a few seconds later is passed a neat little bowl of noodles customarily engulfed by hurried business men at one of the standing counters in the few minutes between trains.
There is a Southern, a New Southern and a Southeastern Exit among numerous other exits, kilometers of sprawling underground concourses, and tens of thousands of Japanese people at any given time coursing through one of the main arteries of the world’s largest city. The station is said to service nearly three million passengers daily.
While this may seem overwhelming, and indeed the sheer number of people in one place is at first, what I was initially and strongly impressed by was how beautifully coordinated, controlled and orderly Shinjuku Station was despite the volume. To begin with, and this probably made a stronger impression on me having grown up in America, which is a relatively dirty country in my opinion, there is very little garbage to be seen in a public area trafficked by literally millions of people everyday.
There are recycling bins located throughout the station, in which people place their rubbish, and none is left on any of the platforms, thrown onto the railways or in any other way improperly discarded, with scant exception. The platforms and escalators are cleaned and maintained, not plastered with chewing gum or drenched in urine.
There are armies of elderly Japanese men and women working with wheeled trash bins replete with an arsenal of cleaning supplies holstered to their side, taking such pride in the level of cleanliness that they vacuum the steps and stand at the top or bottom of the escalator holding a disinfectant towel on the rubber balustrade as it infinitely revolves along with the throngs of passing Japanese people.
And the most amazing part of it all is the surprising order in which the multitude of passengers move from elevator and escalator to platform and train. Naturally there is conversation and noise from the trains, but the station is not raucously loud. People form actual lines behind the yellow lines and Braille blocks, and when the train arrives, the passengers crammed into the individual cars are allowed to alight completely before the waiting passengers board the train, the order of the waiting lines maintained as the boarding passengers step onto the train.
I witnessed very few arguments over the relatively small number of available seats in the literally thousands of times I travelled by train throughout Tokyo, and not one fight or physical altercation in almost seven years. This would be inconceivable with this volume of passengers in the United States, which would often make me wonder what it really meant to live in a "civilized" society.
The trains in Tokyo and most cities in Japan are color-coded, which seems convenient, except that there are so many trains that I remember reading in a manga once that telling someone new to Tokyo to take the “green” train would leave them wondering whether they should take the lime-green, Kelly-green, blue-green train or any of the other greenish-colored train lines available. But with the rail map always posted in the station with the color-coding and most of the station and line names now printed in their Romanized form, Tokyo public transportation is easily navigable if you take your time and relax despite the multitude of people.
That particular day we would be taking the lime-green train, the Yamanote Line. Yamanote (yah-may-no-tay) means "toward" or "close to the hills," which in the otherwise mostly flat Tokyo refers to the small concentration of slightly more elevated land including the imperial palace and more affluent neighborhoods, which the Yamanote line circumscribes, passing through each of the major city centers of Tokyo on its way.
I knew that I needed to be in a place called Mitaka, which I knew was in Tokyo, four days after my arrival for the start of my six-week study abroad program, but had no particular place to go or stay until then, and accepted Yasuko’s offer to help me find someplace to stay until then.
We ended up at the Toko Hotel in Gotanda, the closest thing to a middle-class neighborhood of all the stops on the Yamanote line. The Toko Hotel was in no way remarkable, but the fact that I as a foreigner would choose to stay there seemed to be somewhat remarkable to the staff, who responded with the wonderful Japanese-style hospitality that makes the country such a great place to visit and stay. The Toko Hotel was also located right next to the station, which worked for me as I didn’t plan on spending the next for days in my hotel room when I had all of Tokyo to explore.
For the next day or two Yasuko treated me to a tour of the city. We hit the clubs in Shibuya and Roppongi – Tokyo’s urban fun centers where I would later spend many nights and the occasional early morning bathed in neon and the attention of Japanese girls thinking that whatever I had to do the next day couldn't be better than right now. We took a $200 taxi ride through the ultra-modern, high-speed thoroughfares of Tokyo, crossing Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge and looking out the window over the black water of Tokyo Bay at midnight, illuminated by moonlight and by the combined glow of millions of volts of fluorescence and hundreds of pulsing red aircraft warning lights.
We sang karaoke, and then the next day I had the somewhat strange pleasure of meeting her heretofore unannounced husband. That would be the last time I would see Yasuko.
I was able to find the train to Mitaka with the help of the hotel staff, and arrived for the start of the summer session.
