So I'm fresh off a flight from Narita Airport, where the ground staff wave you goodbye with glowing airport signal sticks and the temperature flatlined at five degrees for a week or so. It was a culture rush. Where to start? Well, me and my boyfriend and a friend I met in the first week of high school, now over ten years ago, headed north for to flee the bushfire/flood of another Aussie summer and celebrate the end of undergraduate uni forever.
Along the way, we found a Netherlands trust fund traveller/philosophy student/writer who doesn't write/player of the Neil Strauss Game and self-proclaimed Napoleon reincarnate. We missed the last bullet train home to Kyoto after a tipsy karaoke session with my boyfriend's unbelievably hip Jap cousins in Shibuya (yes, Lauren, I did the Bill Murray cover of 'More than this' in honour of Lost in Translation), and accidentally stayed in Hotel Zero, in Shibuya's infamous Dogenzaka, or Love Hotel Hill. The windowless room with plastic wrapped mattresses came with free condoms, NHK news and both european and japanese porn. Plus a seductive box of Japanese chocolate wafers and every kind of luxury skin cream imaginable.
While bathing naked as fashion and Japanese tradition dictates, in Japan's most locally famous onsen (hot springs warmed by the lava of volcanoes) in Beppu, my boyfriend was awoken from his blissful onsen sleep by the splashing of a very fat man. After which I ordered 5 for 300 yen somethings from a vending machine...somethings turned out to be eggs hard boiled in said lava heated onsen water. Haha!
We hung out at Harajuku's Takeshita St and Ura-Hara every weekend and every spare day, and are now far too cool to function. Seriously. Haha. A black guy heckling for an out-of-the-way Harajuku back alley fashion store tried to persuade me from my beeline path to pasta lunch, and I nearly punched him. Don't get between me and a meal.
We watched Nagano snow monkeys bathe in onsen north of Tokyo, and a little baby one, tapped on the shoulder by me, turned and shook my finger out of a very Japanese politeness. Although another one attacked my friend. You know how it is.
I bought a second hand bicycle in Kyoto and cycled around like a local for three weeks. You know, that local you see everywhere, with panda ears who keeps falling off her bike? Yep, that's me.
I watched the sun rise through the concrete alleys and valleys, artificial mountains and skyscrapers of Tokyo on the Yamanote Line. My boyfriend was told he was a Japanese Olympic Swimmer lookalike who, during the month we were there, kept advertising Quarter Pounders (tagline: Big Mouth! No Limit! Quarter Pounder!) We flew by Fuji-san on the Shinkansen at 259km/h (and that was the SLOW train...the other Nozomi bullet trains zoom through the country at 500km/h)
My friend did a 12 hour marathon date with her kinda boyfriend. We met another Aussie soul struck with wanderlust, with absolutely no homesickness for her home country (she's from the Shire, so really, it's quite understandable), with whom I wandered Fukuoka for four hours, blissfully lost, eating Ramen at Ramen Stadium in Canal City, watching a Jap Amelie-lookalike play the accordion as her boyfriend juggled for unbearably cute kids. We talked about love and life and other things. Ceiling Wax. Cabbages and Kings!
It was that kind of trip. Life is beautiful, as it always was, as you always knew. But it helps when you find an MIT student hired to design a world-leading eco-green city in the suburbs of Tokyo filled with the same awe, to share the culture rush over an egg and coffee breakfast on a quiet Kyoto street. Cheers Chris! Hope you read In Praise of Shadows. Here's to the nothing-like-Shibuya-green-city that only a generation raised in the smoke of overcrowding, Blade Runner dystopias and SUV supremacy could imagine. And thanks for voting in Obama.
"I think it's great that a country where once the slave class of black men worked under a crippling racial divide now, after the Civil Rights Movement, can elect a leader from that class to change the nation. This is what I think people mean when they speak of the dream that is America. We are an idea. An idea that opportunity is for anyone - hispanic, black, asian, white." Well, Chris from MIT, I agree. Who could deny it?
Of course, I have a few poems to light the way of tall tales so good, they could only be true. Here's Number 1. I wrote it on the second or third night after landing in Tokyo. The title is from a billboard we kept seeing everywhere (we got very lost, as we thought it was feasible to walk three suburbs to Shinkjuku from Ikebukuro, the sex/dinner/shopping district where we stayed) - a handsome Japanese soccer star's face underlined by the words: Human x Beauty (Take Action!). No other explanation. It's a call to action, honey!
Human x Beauty (Take Action!)
Ricochet pachinko
Let it go, glow
Living in the Seibu side of Ikebukuro
Where Tobu pleasures sell their wares to the Seibu West
Let it flow and fall into an
Unquestionable logic.
Chaos underscores Order, and order - chaos
It is a happy marriage. Mutually beneficial, contractually binding
Quid pro quo.
Flip it over and re-use
Break it at the bend, renew
"Happiness" (you see)
"Spurs the world's turning"
On an ever replenished wheel
Oscillating wildly
Beyond evil/good. Useful/used.
It all is as it is. And ever was.
And will be.
This is the philosophy of
"Kinda Buddhism", practised by Yu-kun
Tokyoite to a tee, who studied at university
Because of Bruce Willis in a blockbuster Hollywood
Armaggedon, the movie
Astrophysics, the Masters Degree.
Citibank graduate by March
He loves this city. I love it too.
This world, its whacky cool
Accustomed to its contradictions
Fashions and ideas flow with the seasons
Rather than reason.
In the air, an ineffable urge
A spark, a dark well un-filled
To go - anywhere
'Takodanobaba, Gotanda, Shibuya, Ginza
Haha, Hakata'
We're half-cracked blooms
Cherry blooms - sakura
Dying at their height of life and drifting
Boom. Eh? Kapow!
'I need something to do now.'
We'll head to be Beppu, in a week or two
"Nani? Bepp-oooo? You know?"
Yu-kun knows, impressed.
"You are very energetic, you know.
Good for a writer."
Domo arigato.
Curious too. Another essential.
I want - the beginning, the end, the middle
In that order. I can wait.
Take a day, take a lifetime.
Time ticks down its hours
The world turns
Salarymen file home on the 6am commuter
Necking a callgirl on the stairs to the street
Dawn is grey, daybreak calls
Other night-watchers
Gaijin honing in on the Pig and Whistle
Lovers 'nesting' (vigorously) and by the hour
Pachinko slot addicts blinking in the first sun rays
Sex show hecklers in full body black coats
"Are they Yakuza?" asks my friend.
"Will they steal us into sexual servitude?"
"Do they live in rich Shibuya?"
Hai, hai. (Yes, yes, sure.)
4.01AM.
I have a point to prove.
Though words, as always, will not do.
Do not do.
By the shadows as they slip between the cracks
Of the steel frame wire-net window
Frosted by midwinter snow
I can feel its pulse. The grappling logic.
Of whacky-mad order.
Turning over worlds
Re-use, renew.
Goodnight, and thank you.
(c) Wenee Yap, 14/01/2009.
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