Leaving Japan: an email
Here’s the text of an email I sent from Kansai International Airport to a few people at around 11:00 (Japan time) today:
Hi all,
Kansai airport has free wireless internet (one of the few good things about Japan!), so I thought I’d send you all and email. It’s just past 11:00am here, and I’m sitting in the departure lounge at gate 13, which you reach from the main terminal building by taking a ridiculously short train trip: probably about 1 minute or less.
It’s been an expensive day so far. My bags are massively heavy, and I wasn’t in the mood for the ordeal of walking them all the way to the Namba Nankai station and trying to get them up the escalators to the platform the airport train leaves from on the third floor. Kansai airport is not that far from Osaka, but the route there is very circuitous, and takes about 45 minutes. Including highway tolls, the ride cost me just under 15,000¥ (A$171.46), but it did take me right to the terminal doors, where the taxi driver helped me load my luggage onto a trolley. Driving on the elevated highways that shadow most of Osaka’s main roads is a surprising experience, feeling like a trip through a second city. The height of most buildings halves, and instead of highways above you, there is sky and sunlight. If not for the smog, at that level you could almost imagine Osaka was a liveable city. The highway to the airport passes Tempozan (where the aquarium is), the mass of factories at Nanko, some other areas I didn’t recognise, and finally passes over a huge bridge spanning out into the bay and to the island where the airport rests.
While waiting for the check-in counter to open, I met an interesting young guy from Phoenix, who works for United Airlines and can travel all over the world free of charge. He and his companion had spent most of the time between today and last Sunday shuttling between various American cities looking for a flight back to Arizona, before giving up and deciding to check out Osaka for a day. They weren’t impressed, and so I told them about how I hated living in Japan, which amused them and drew some disapproving glances from a middle-aged Western couple sitting nearby.
Returning to Australia, my suitcases are 7.8kg overweight, racking up a massive 34,000¥ (A$388.68) in excess baggage charges. It’s just as well I got all 50,000¥ of my apartment deposit back yesterday, and that having spent my time in Osaka earning A$3000-4000 a month, I feel like I can afford to pay for the luxury of returning in ease. Last night, there was little of the between-suitcase load-shuffling I went through when leaving, and none of the choosing what to leave behind. I’m coming home: I might as well do it properly and bring everything back.
The rest of my Japanese coins, which the money-changers in Melbourne won’t take, I spent on a copy of Malcom Gladwell’s Blink: The power of thinking without thinking (1040¥, A$11.89), a pack of aspartame-free chewing gum (elusive in Japan), and a bottle of green tea.
Beyond the customs and immigration gates, airports are strange places, mostly out of the country they sit in, but not quite. The Japanese ordeal is over. Leaving Australia, I felt relieved to break out of the rut I was in at home, but the overwhelming feeling was of excitement at starting fresh in Japan. Now, though I’m looking forward to coming back to Melbourne and doing new things, the dominant feeling is of relief that I’m finally out of Japan. It doesn’t reflect a lack of enthusiasm about coming back: rather, it shows just how much I loathed living in Osaka.
Time to board now!
Loose change
Looking around modern Japan, I don’t know why, but invisible rules have grown up everywhere. Lifestyle, human relations, clothing, deportment—each of these is enclosed in a framework. Just as the audience at a wedding stands up, sits down, and points their camera at the MC, so people are bound up in rules. (Nakano Kiyotsugu, quoted in Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: The fall of modern Japan, 307)
At the Citibank branch in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, I just deposited 5168¥ in loose change. That’s 8 months worth of living in Japan, plus the contents of a moneybox someone left behind in my old apartment in Gunma-ken. At today’s exchange rate, that’s A$60.37 in individually nigh-worthless pieces of metal, including exactly 1268 individual one-yen pieces. It took maybe 15 minutes for the tellers to count, with the aid of a machine, and at the end of it I had to fill in the amount on a deposit slip I’d already written my name, the date, and my account number on. It was then I made my mistake.
I’d been marking up my copy of Dogs and Demons with a pencil, on the page bearing the quote above. Jung would have been impressed by the synchronicity. I used the pencil to write the first digit of the amount. Realizing what I’d done, I carefully wrote over that 5 with the biro on the counter, and continued on to the 1, the 7, and the 0.
I’d heard about having to fill out forms again if you made a mistake and a correction. This is apparently a common thing in Japan, but it’s never happened to me before. I certainly never expected it to happen in a North American bank, with a mistake that was completely invisible. Completely invisible, except that the teller had seen me use a pencil on the 5.
She reached up to get a new deposit slip from a high shelf in the cupboard behind her, gave it to me, and asked: “Can you fill it out again?” No need for explanation, I knew what had just happened. Fortunately, this was just a deposit slip. I can imagine wasting hours rewriting multi-page forms for the sake of a single mistake. It reminds me of how, at 7 or 8, I used to cross out any word I’d written with a malformed letter, fearful that I’d inadvertently write a secret sign that would summon the devil to steal my soul. I kid you not. It’s obsessive behaviour.
“This is insane,” I raged at the teller. The wait for the counting hadn’t worked me up; no, it was 8 months in Japan that had done that.
“What is ‘insine’?” she asked sweetly.
“It’s crazy!” I explained. “Look at this…” And I showed her the carbon paper behind the form. “Fifty-one seventy, clear as day.”
“Yes, it’s clear, but you have to fill out a new form.”
“Why?”
“It’s the rule.”
“That’s crazy.”
“But still you have to do it.”
And so it continued. I told her, “I don’t have to do this in my country,” which surprised her, and—oh, the eloquence!—I told her: “this is the stupidest thing ever.”
And so it is. And so I filled out a new form.
Still not satisfied, the teller asked me: “Could you write the yen sign here, in front of the amount, please.” And I raged again.
“Why don’t you write it then, since I’m incapable of filling out a form correctly? Why don’t you get a machine to do it, or a robot?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t fill it in.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not allowed to.” More rules.
And so I wrote it, and I got my receipt, and I walked away.
I ought to have got some attitude from the teller, but sadly in Japan people won’t even tell you to go fuck yourself.
I hate this country with unholy passion.
Clubbing
Last night I went “clubbing” for the first time in my life. Sure, I’d been to bars that play loud music before, and places with a dancefloor, and places where you can’t hear your friends when you try to talk to them. But I’d always tried to avoid places that are those things so relentlessly as to be called a club.
3000¥ at Club Pure Osaka will get a guy a plastic cup that entitles you to all the mixed spirits you can drink. Girls get the same for 2000¥. The rule is that if you don’t have an empty plastic cup, you can’t get the drinks you paid for, so you have to carry it with you everwhere you go. Most people dance with a cup in their hand, and going to the bathroom means setting it down on a free surface. I actually saw a guy drinking out of his cup while taking a piss, which was a great image of the absurd, and the instigator of a bleakly humorous moment of existential dread.
So, I drank, and I danced, and I watched poledancing Japanese girls, exchanged a few brief words with my friend Erika and a few people I hadn’t met before. I didn’t try to pick anyone up, because Japanese girls don’t interest me, and moreover because I don’t know how to act in those situations. The loud music, drowning out conversation, seems calculated to reduce the crowd to as close to mere animality as it can. The courtship rituals, the display of bodies and movement, become like those of birds. And I don’t like it much. I like being a human. It’s where my advantages are, in my intellect, in my speech, in my knowledge and my accomplishments. Those, too, are the things in others that most easily give me pleasure in their company, and the things that solidify my attraction to a woman.
Dancing is fun. Drinking seems fun, but is tiresome to recover from (and I ought to steer clear of situations with unlimited amounts of alcohol). But the idea and the fact of a room that strips away the human in us displeases me, much as it may be, for many, a welcome temporary escape from the burdens of being sentient.
Xbox 360: It’s big in Japan
Microsoft are busy gearing up for this month’s launch of the Xbox 360 in Japan, hoping to succeed with it where Xbox failed. Since the original Xbox’s sheer size and ugliness undoubtedly contributed to its unpopularity in Japan, putting a giant Xbox 360 on display at the Umeda Hankyu station in Osaka this week may not be the best of ideas, but it certainly is drawing the attention of passers by, including me.
Xbox 360 with miniature security guard… Actually, the 360 is giant…
The giant Xbox 360 from above.
The upper glowing square is a very large HDTV showing trailers of Xbox 360 titles including Perfect Dark Zero. The lower square is a faceplate display.
The giant Xbox 360 from the other side.
Some of the faceplates on display inside the giant Xbox 360.