Tokyo Through Glass

You can observe but not immerse

Tokyo is by most accounts the largest city and the largest metropolitan area in the world, at 13 million and 37 million people respectively. By definition, a visit of a few days is inadequate to get more than a superficial glimpse.

But for someone like me, who is accustomed to travelling in Europe, North America and the Middle East, there is an additional barrier. I speak not a word of Japanese and the script is utterly unintelligible to me.

Almost no one I encountered spoke English. Even in areas heavily trafficked by tourists, the most English I encountered consisted of the few words necessary to take a meal order or point me to the rest room. More frequently, I was directed wordlessly to a pin-pad or a parking space with graceful, almost balletic gestures that I have never encountered anywhere else in the world before.

It is definitely possible to get around Tokyo with the assistance of Google Maps and English signage in the subways, though to be honest my brother and sister-in-law, who come here often, did all of the navigation. But there was no chance to chat with a local at a bar or a coffee shop, for example.

The most accessible aspect of any culture is often food. Japanese restaurants famously advertise with uncannily realistic models of their dishes in their front windows, such as those pictured below. Once made in paraffin, nowadays they are usually made by specialized craftspeople out of polyvinyl chloride.

Menus also are often lavishly illustrated, which can help if there is no English.

I can honestly say I haven’t had a bad meal in Japan, and there seems to be no correlation between the effort expended on the interior decor and the excellence of the food. I had superb meals in a number of restaurants that looked very basic. Wherever you eat, and however modest the meal, there is always great attention paid to harmonious presentation.

I am fully aware that this is an ageing society, but in the central city, on the subways, and in shopping and tourist areas we visited, you would not get that impression. Instead, I saw mostly young people, for the most part slender and short in stature but strikingly healthy looking. It is a cliche that the Japanese are conformists, and certainly I saw much less variation in dress, for example, than I am accustomed to elsewhere.

Young people crowd into Takeshita street where there are shops catering to their tastes.

But where conformity dominates, eccentricity may flourish. There are a lot of cafes and restaurants with weird themes in Tokyo. There are cat cafes and capybara cafes, where you can enjoy your tea in the company of your selected species.

We visited an owl cafe and a robot restaurant. Below, our robot waiter performs Gangnam Style—one of many popular and classical songs in his or her repertoire. (We asked what pronouns the robot preferred and it said that as a robot it had no gender and was happy to answer to him, her, it or they.)

On the busy streets of Tokyo, you also see people dressed as animals driving go-karts, though admittedly, this gentleman, resplendent as Tony the Tiger, appears to be a tourist. Personally, I am not too proud to wear an animal costume in a strange city, but I am disinclined to drive a go-kart in central city traffic.

One day, we hired a guide and driver to go up to Mt. Fuji, the iconic volcano that can be seen on a clear day from Tokyo, though I never glimpsed it from there. It is celebrated for its beauty and symmetry. It was a lovely day, but interestingly, the guide was a Pakistani, as I noticed many other guides were, which again was a barrier to getting to know the country even a little bit on a social level.

The snow-capped summit of Mt. Fuji.

All around the Mt. Fuji summit there are Shinto shrines because the mountain has a spiritual significance for many Japanese. You can buy a little wooden plaque on which you inscribe a wish that priests will use to pray on your behalf and at many shrines there are also offerings of casks of sake, the famous Japanese rice wine.

Wishes

Sake casks.

Back in Tokyo, there was also a wall of sake casks at the magnificent Meiji-Jingu shrine, built as a tribute to the emperor in 1920. Luckily for us, there happened to be a traditional Shinto wedding procession when we were there.

The bride recognizes someone she knows in the crowd as the wedding procession passes through the Meiji-Jingu shrine and tourists (like me) snap pictures.

On our last day in Tokyo, we went to a digital art presentation by teamLab Planets. Someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think this kind of installation began here in Tokyo, though the company behind it has now started to mount them elsewhere in the world.

I have certainly never experienced anything like it. There are many many rooms, large and small, with connecting corridors, each of which features a different moving digital design. Although every room has a distinctive theme, the images are constantly changing and sometimes gravitate from one space to another, accompanied by music.

Although most people (myself included) spend much of their time in the installation shooting pictures and videos on their phones, the images do not capture the sensation of being surrounded, walls, ceiling and floor, with constantly transforming phantasms.

Still, I’ve embedded a couple of short videos here.

Japan is relatively cheap these days. The yen is weak and the country has not suffered from inflation the way the rest of us have. It is a place filled with interest and wonder—not to mention fantastic food. But don’t expect to get to know the locals if you don’t speak Japanese, even a little.