Tokyo, 1 Apr 2009 - 9 Apr 2009

I'm home now, sipping on green tea I'd gotten at Narita Airport, in a duty-free shop called Little Akihabara. I'm thinking of Tokyo, inevitably, about the way she shone in light as in darkness, the Silver City.

We took a flight out from Singapore on the 1st of April, transited in Hong Kong and landed in Narita that evening. After a flurry of activity sorting out our train passes, and getting to Asakusa station on the metro, we had to walk to our hostel in the rain. First impressions: a lot of grey, in the buildings, the highways, in the faces of people. Huddled cheer behind rain-dappled screens of drinking places, alcohol in the breath almost visible, and smoke trailing upwards from cigarettes certainly so, around unshaded lightbulbs. We paced across a bridge over Sumida Gawa and the wind hit me, so I pulled my jacket tighter around me and tucked my chin in closer to my chest. The waters of the river were dark and lifeless. At the hostel it was gratifying to find a warm bed, then, and everything working as they're supposed to. Efficiency in the Japanese style, I figured.

Anyhow, that was the start, and I don't want to impose a chronology. For a summary of the events of our trip I refer you to the online journals of my valiant fellow travellers, who are far more orderly and diligent chroniclers than myself. This entry is a collection of my random thoughts.

A complete outsider has no business being in Japan. To interpret the land and its people without thinking it completely absurd, or, in the words of an American tourist I bypassed, "what a bunch of freaks", requires a deliberate inquest into comprehending the world view of the Japanese. I say this not to make sweeping generalisations, but only in the way that one would say, Singaporeans are pragmatic by nature, or Americans value freedom in the utmost. Yet, it would be completely insufficient to go by the same bent and think we understand the Japanese knowing that "they were very bad in World War II", or that "they are innovative and hardworking, as evidenced by the success of Sony and Toyota".

Comprehension of the most daily Japanese habits would still be beyond us. How could one explain why in any restaurant or department stall, every guide or waiter or salesperson greets everybody and nobody with great gaiety and is helpful to a fault, while everywhere else, on the streets, in the metro in particular, people are either sullen in reading or so aloof as to appear unapproachable. Or why a country that upholds strict customs of tea-drinking should think it appropriate for people in rowdy groups to consume large amounts of alcohol in the day while sitting in a park. Or how the country's largest gay festival can be held annually beside one of the major Buddhist temples of the city, like it were a sort of pilgrimage.

I don't think I understand the Japanese people any better after 9 days of being among them. Perhaps I'm just starting to be capable of describing them. There are many things I admire about Tokyo, but there is also a knowing that my admiration does not make them better pleased to any degree; sometimes it seems to me that the opinion of outsiders is to the Japanese completely irrelevant, beyond helping them decide in purely academic terms their own place in the world.

Tokyo can make one feel very small indeed. Walking anywhere in the major shopping districts on the weekends - Shinjuku, Aoyama, Harajuku, Shibuya (I don't even want to think about what Akihabara would have been like) gave me headaches. Entire streets peopled to the edge of the kerbs, and I thought that from a high point the place would have looked like the patterns on the face of a multi-coloured Rorschach - thick lines always in motion, snaking, shifting. There is always something to assault the senses, salespeople shouting into brightly coloured cones, thumping music from a Pachinko joint round the corner, a striking billboard featuring the latest revolutionary Sony contraption. I think it takes time to learn how to shut out all that noise and perhaps some people are excited by never-ending activity like that. I, for one, was swamped.

Most of the time though, walking, which we did plenty of, was easy enough. I remember walking through Nihombashi just before rush hour, from the Bank of Japan past the buildings of the major Japanese banks, to Nihombashi itself, to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Down the roads lining the financial centre of Tokyo, there is an odd mix of architecture, from the outlandishly modern in the fashion of today's silver and glass to Gothic, mixed in with distinctly Japanese garden landscaping, all clean lines and singular trees. It is a little like walking down Boat Quay, except that it is difficult to think of Boat Quay as anything other than an interesting place forcefully appended with influences from a patchwork of cultures , going from an Irish pub to a Chinese seafood restaurant to Coffee Club. In Nihombashi, one gets the feeling that the melange is together something that can be called modern Japan, underlined by a distinct sense of the history of the place and of course, the ramen shops that line the subway malls just beneath the walkways.

And within Nihombashi itself, a different look at Tokyo. In Takashimaya Nihombashi, the first and the original. A small departmental store by today's standards, but what the tourist guides would describe as having "old-fashioned charm". As we approached the building in the fading light of late afternoon its facade of red bricks made it look almost quaint, a cottage in a forest of pointed silver spires. Inside Takashimaya the shopping is laid out almost generously. No winding shopways, lined on both sides with retailers. Rather, marble in maroon and cream contained within a space a single glance can take in. In the basement, food galore, and Japanese people examining slabs of raw fish and other assorted seafood. In other spaces, cakes and desserts, and some fruits. Once again, it was a little strange to a person used to Singapore's supermarkets, if only for the fact that the whole place carried a near- exclusively Japanese flavour, the only foreign influence I recall is a stall selling 'Szechuan style delights'.

Next, a Tokyo almost unreal. We walked uphill a fair distance before arriving at Yanaka, a district, or chome, where we walked through a dense concentration of Japanese shrines and temples from the Edo period, and certainly some from long before that. I read somewhere that in contrast with elaborate Chinese or Korean designs, the Japanese aesthetic is often grounded in nature - woods and stones that blend into, or are representative of, natural landscapes. The author related it to the relatively long time the Japanese people spent in feudal backwardness, when there was no need for displays of richesse intended to impress. To these sensibilities of old Yanaka in itself was something of a shrine. Somehow this particularly Japanese aesthetic appeals quite naturally to modern tastes, and it was rather in admiration and awe that I walked down those old streets, leaving our modern time further behind with each step. We walked through a cemetery dedicated to a shogun whose name I don't remember. I wondered if the Japanese actively make it a point to grow sakura trees in every cemetery, as something for the dead to look forward to, year on year.

I wandered off myself during our last night in Tokyo, ending up in a suburb on the inner rim of Greater Tokyo. The reality is, the suburbs make up by far the largest part of Tokyo, and my guess is that they are largely homogeneous. So before we entertain notions of Tokyo as a city ready any given moment to burst at the seams with activity, it is only fair to describe accurately those large swaths of residential drudgery ignored by tourists, expats and travel guides, but around which the lives of most of Tokyo's residents revolve. On tired legs I trudged to the district's all-purpose departmental store, where I acquired a bento set at half price and a packet of milk. I walked along a canal, man-made and overgrown with water plants, and wondered what sort of odour would emit from it in the hot summer months. On a cool spring night, however, it seemed to me to reflect the blank, imperturbable exteriors of those occasional white-collar workers (sararimen, OLs, career women) who unseeing cycled past, like ghosts on a straight road home.

I made for a playground settled in grey sand, and picked a bench to sit down on. I don't think the Japanese have anti-homeless benches. A young family had chosen the same playground for an evening picnic. I watched the girl, of about 5 years, clamber with effort up the ascending platforms, where on the highest her father waited. The two came together noisily, the girl making loud approving sounds and her father clapping his hands. She proceeded on to the slide, and came to a complete stop halfway. She looked uncertain for just a second before she stood up and ran the rest of the way down, squealing with delight as she entered into the waiting arms of her mother. All around the streets were quiet, and not many windows were lit along the rows of low, grey houses.

I don't think my account of Tokyo would be complete without a tribute to the exquisite food. The city is dotted with Western fast food chains, but one has to wonder how they survive in competition with the OISHI-inducing goodness of ramen, soba, udon, sushi, curry, gyudon, tempura don, unagi don, sukiyaki etc that completely and thoroughly destroyed our tolerance for inferior fare after 9 days of unfailingly satisfying gastronomical perfection.

A city of many aspects, then, the biggest and most populous of its kind, and perhaps the strangest to our common sensibilities. The centre of a civilisation on the Eastern edge of the world, ignored and self-enclosed for so long in its history, drawn out of its shell by international winds of change. It might well have preferred to have been left to itself.