The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  “You mean like prostitutes?” I asked. None of this had been mentioned on the Airbnb listing.

  “Mainly, no,” Hayashi said. “It’s more young people who live with their parents. But Japanese people really don’t live in that area. They wouldn’t want to.” When I didn’t appear reassured, she smiled and told me not to worry. “It’s not dangerous, not dirty,” she said. “It’s just . . . very . . . specific.”

  I asked if she thought Airbnb would eventually take off in Japan. Hayashi considered the question awhile, then gave a kind of yes-and-no answer. “Japanese people are very comfortable with the concept of sharing,” she said, citing the close quarters in which many families lived and the tradition of using sentou, communal bathhouses. It’s just that they are less accustomed to sharing with outsiders. She mentioned a restaurant nearby with a NO FOREIGNERS sign in its window and referred also to the fact that her country spent two centuries living under an isolationist government policy that pretty much forbade interaction with the outside world.

  “We are not familiar living with foreign people,” Hayashi said, giving a lighthearted shrug. “I mean, Japan is an island. It’s like, foreign people . . . What do you even eat?”

  Haruko Miki’s house sits at the crest of a gentle hill, a 10-minute walk from the train station. She bowed when she opened the door. She was 75, a widow in white slacks and a hot-pink sweater. Inside the entryway, we removed our shoes. Thinking ahead to our departure, Miki leaned down and reoriented each pair so that they faced back toward the door.

  She spoke virtually no English, though she did have one go-to phrase—“green towels”—which she usually deployed right off the bat when showing Airbnb guests around her place, demarcating the line between what was theirs and what was hers. Their sheets are green; their towels are green; hers are not. The system seems to work. Miki’s house is small by most American standards, but by Japanese standards, it’s large. There are a couple of bedrooms upstairs, where her oldest daughter lives with her husband and their three children, and some sort of open loft area, where someone had the television turned up loud. Miki is slim and grandmotherly and told us, through the translator, that for years she has made a good living selling Tupperware to friends. She signed up for Airbnb 14 months earlier, when a friend of her daughter’s, who was already hosting, suggested she might like it, for both the sociability and the money. After she served tea, Miki walked us through a compact living room and a galley kitchen and then down a hallway past her own bedroom to a second tiny room.

  “This is where the visitors sleep,” she said, as the rest of us took turns stepping in to look. Its floor was covered by traditional straw-mat tatami. There were two green futons folded up against the wall. A single window covered in rice paper filtered the light from outside. She’d had Australians, Italians, Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese, Canadians, and also, because she happens to be fluent in Korean, a good number of Koreans come through. “When I signed up, I thought it would be one or two a month, but it’s all the time,” she says. “Last month, I had only two days off.” A family from New York—a mother, father, and baby—was staying there at the time. There was no sign of them, except some luggage piled neatly in one corner. Miki had just done their laundry, which was drying on the patio outside.

  Then she donned a red apron, heated a frying pan, and started making us lunch. Kenny and Lee were recording everything Miki said. They snapped photos of the knickknacks on her shelves and the guest book in which people wrote comments about their stays. The study Kenny and Lee were making was at once methodical and impressionistic, an attempt to build a portrait of host-guest dynamics in Japan to be delivered back to San Francisco for further discussion. They would later note that Miki, despite appearing as an older woman in an apron, was both an entrepreneur and an adventurer, as evidenced by her career in Tupperware and the fact, as she told us, that she celebrated her 50th birthday in the Australian outback, skydiving over Ayers Rock. Airbnb’s mission, in part, was to identify and encourage outliers like Miki. It’s how the service has gained footing in every new market—adopted first by the risk-takers and then normalized over time. Kenny asked each person a set list of questions, the final and arguably most important one being, “How can we find more people like you?”

  Miki, hearing the question, laughed. In an incredibly short time, she had produced a plate of scallion pancakes, a bowl of peanuts sautéed with spices, some pickled daikon radishes, and a pile of potatoes cut into perfect little pyramids, fried until crisp and then tossed in a sticky sweet sauce. She mentioned that some of her friends were interested in renting out their spare rooms, but their husbands wouldn’t allow it. “They say, ‘I will do it when my husband dies.’” She added that her own husband never would have approved of the menagerie of strangers now coming through their house. “You know, Japanese are really . . .” She paused, searching for the right words. “They just don’t want to bring foreigners to Japan.”

  She herself had a high tolerance for all of it, for the people who came and the stilted conversations conducted largely through hand gestures, for the puddles they left on her bathroom floor, the laundry she did free of charge, the loads of food they consumed at her table, and the way they sometimes threw their clothes all over her tatami room. She was even tolerant of the French, whom she admitted, when pressed, could be the most challenging guests of all. It was a labor, to be sure, but it was profitable, and it also seemed to mean something to her. One of her daughters lived in Los Angeles for eight years, and Miki had gone for extended visits. She knew acutely what it felt like to be dislocated, the stun of a country that’s not your own. She offered a steadying, if not particularly glamorous, refuge. She served people tea made with herbs from her garden and rice cakes wrapped in seaweed. She unfolded their green-sheeted futons before bed at night.

  The more we talked with Miki, the more I wanted to go lie on her couch in front of her knickknack cabinet and wait for the next warm meal. My place, Ultimate Tokyo-Sized Experience!!, turned out to be clean and quiet (as advertised) but also strange and lonely. It was a spare, single bedroom, not more than eight feet wide, with a narrow foldout futon, a minifridge, minitelevision, and minimicrowave, and a flimsy door, behind which was a bathroom just big enough to fit a body. Like a lot of Airbnb listings, it was rented as “entire place” rather than “private room,” which meant no host was in residence. But in this case, I’m not sure any host was ever in residence. The listing was run by some sort of conglomerate or management company, and checking in involved no human interaction whatsoever. To get there, I carried my luggage up a neon-lit hill—past something called Hotel Fifteen Love, past places called Pub Slow Jam, Adult Shop Joyful, and Baby Doll, and a pet store that sold fluffed-up puppies and kittens and still somehow managed to look seedy—to the concrete apartment building where it was located. The door was unlocked. A key had been left inside. I had no idea where I’d landed.

  Miki, despite the language barrier, seemed to know a lot about her guests. She described a woman who came to stay with her while she was on business in Japan and developed heat exhaustion, or maybe just exhaustion in general. (“She was so busy,” observed Miki.) There was a young guy who arrived from Korea, saying he just wanted to get away from his parents, who were pestering him to get married. (“He needed some quiet,” she said.) An Italian man came to stay and cried the whole time, confessing to Miki that he had cheated on his Japanese wife and now she’d left him. “I took him to the Emperor’s Palace to try and cheer him up,” she told us, adding that it didn’t work at all. Somewhere along the way, though, she delivered the kind of blunt-force, stranger-to-stranger advice that cuts handily across cultures. The man’s wife eventually took him back, Miki informed us, and she was happy to claim some of the credit: “I told him,” she said, shaking a finger as she described it, “he just had to stop with the affairs.”

  Last winter, Airbnb conducted focus groups in Tokyo, gathering people who knew nothing about the service and showin
g them the Japanese-language version of the Airbnb website on smartphones, complete with the castles and the treehouses, the full flight of whimsy. Anne Kenny was part of the group that watched what happened through a one-way window. “It was clear that not everyone understood the concept,” she told me.

  Those who did had questions—a lot of them. “It was: ‘What if this happens? What if that happens? What if I’m a guest, and my host makes me dinner, and I don’t want to finish it?’” Kenny recalled one morning as we sat in a café in Shibuya, not far from Love Hotel Hill. “Here they are, they haven’t booked a trip. They haven’t traveled. They’re just looking at a website, and already they’re going through the what-ifs.” One participant asked what would happen if he rented a place online and then, when he got there, it turned out to be a supermarket. Someone else studied a photo of a Western host posed casually with a coconut-water drink on her lap and, seeming flummoxed, asked, “How would I even address her?” It was, you might say, a full-on display of uncertainty avoidance, though perhaps not surprising in a country that’s routinely walloped by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and typhoons and was, at the time, just a few years past a horrifying tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Still, it didn’t necessarily bode well for business.

  There was one woman, however, who grasped the idea immediately. “She was like: ‘I can stay in a castle? You put castles on this site? That’s amazing,’” Kenny said. She pulled out her laptop and showed me a photo taken at the focus group. A half-dozen young women sat around a conference-room table; five of them were dressed in gray or black. The sixth wore an electric-orange sweater. She, of course, was the castle lover, an instant icon for Kenny and her colleagues. “There was something so distinct in her mannerisms,” Kenny said. “Even from behind the window, you could see she was genuinely excited about it. It was like: What is it about this woman in the bright orange sweater that makes her more interested in the idea of Airbnb, even as all her peers are focused on the worst-case scenarios?”

  The woman in the orange sweater matters as an ideal, not just to Airbnb but to any company breaking into a new market, especially a market that may be inherently resistant to what’s being sold. She’s an early adopter in chrysalis form—curious, unconcerned with convention, seemingly willing to gamble on something unproved, ready to buy. Or sell. When I jokingly asked Kenny if they’d tried to recruit the woman as an Airbnb host in Tokyo, she laughed and said no, adding, “But we probably should have.”

  On the surface, the superhosts Kenny and Lee interviewed over the course of several days had little in common with one another—a husband and wife expecting their first child, a cool guy who liked to take his guests clubbing, a well-off gay couple who’d bought a second apartment as an investment—but they were all Orange Sweaters in a way. All spoke at least a little bit of English. More important, it seemed, everyone had some defining experience with outsiders. Two of the couples were multinational—Japanese natives with partners who were American and Chinese. Other hosts were Japanese by birth but had lived in other countries or traveled a lot. This appeared to give them a certain renegade perspective, a degree of global cross-pollination and comfort with strangers that seemed to put them at odds with many of the people around them, but also made them more like other Airbnb users internationally.

  A number of the Tokyo hosts said they deliberately kept quiet about their involvement with Airbnb. “It’s kind of like talking about your investment portfolio,” one said. “You really only discuss it with the very closest of friends.” Japan has a national hotel law, which requires the licensing of any business that provides accommodation, though enforcement is spotty. But there’s also a tradition of individuals renting rooms to students or short-term visitors, called minpaku, which is considered legal. Airbnb, as it does in many countries, exists—nimbly, cannily—in a gray area. Mostly, people feared their neighbors, concerned that one poor interaction with a foreigner—one noisy night, one trampled flowerbed, one failure to interpret the boundaries of what was acceptable—might lead to a police complaint or problems with a landlord.

  I was starting to see why foreigners in Japan were so worrying, so problematic. Accompanied by a translator who knew the city, Kenny, Lee, and I moved around Tokyo with relative ease, but the second she clocked out for the day, we were shucked instantly of our grace. We walked down the wrong streets, ordered things we didn’t intend to at restaurants, were bumbling when counting our yen at cash registers. Kenny had taken to bowing at everyone she saw. When spoken to in Japanese, Lee and I automatically, like dummies, responded in Spanish. We swam constantly in uncertainty. We wandered the basement food court of a fancy department store in Ginza, looking at sugary pastries that were shaped like fish and raw fish that had been cut to look like candy. We stood dumbfounded in front of a cantaloupe that cost $127. I felt as alien as I’d ever felt in my life.

  One morning, we visited a 27-year-old tech blogger named Ryoma Machida, who lives with his wife in a small house in a densely populated neighborhood and rents out a room on Airbnb. He also manages 11 other Airbnb properties. Machida has a mop of hair and a thoughtful demeanor. He studied international business at a university in New Zealand and first learned about Airbnb by reading Mashable. He had a picture of Steve Jobs taped to his refrigerator.

  Machida was trying to start a business called Zens that would help more Japanese people host on Airbnb, taking care of bookings and guest communication and even designing custom-made furniture for compact spaces that could store bulky luggage. He was thinking ambitiously. He saw the 2020 Olympics as an opportunity not just for himself but for Japan. Sitting with his dog on his lap, he spoke about the fact that Japan’s population was aging and its economy faltering. “We have 8.3 million empty homes in this country,” he said. “We have smaller families, less money.” He went on to describe how he’d like to start working with communities in the Japanese countryside to encourage them to open their homes to foreigners, who would then come spend money and slowly start to revitalize the economy. “Airbnb,” he said, “could be a Japan-saver.”

  It was a difficult path to forge, however, not just because Airbnb was relatively unknown in Japan, but also because the startup mentality did not seem to play well in general there. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which collects data on business growth, Japan has among the lowest levels of startup activity in the world, with roughly 3.7 percent of the adult population engaged in entrepreneurship—as compared with about 13 percent in the United States. Machida, though, struck me as a change-maker, an individualist who was nonetheless sensitive to his own culture’s collectivist norms. He chalked up the resistance to outsiders largely to a simple lack of exposure. A number of his friends, he said, had never spoken to a foreigner in their lives. He was working to remedy this by organizing informal get-togethers between Airbnb visitors and Japanese friends a couple of times a month, spreading the word via Facebook. With neighbors who weren’t sure what to make of his foreign guests, he tried to humanize them: “I say: ‘Today we have guests from France. They are 35 years old, and they are teachers.’”

  At the same time, he also worked to educate Airbnb guests on the Japanese way of doing things. When new guests checked in to a place he managed, he met them personally, showing them how to remove their shoes at the door and explaining that they needed to speak more quietly than maybe they did at home. Sometimes, though, the gulf between cultures felt unbridgeable, the boundaries impossible to translate. Machida described running afoul of a building co-op board, forced to close one of his listings after a visitor from Europe was spotted, to someone’s apparent horror, charging her cell phone in the building’s lobby.

  Later, as Kenny, Lee, and Suda were debriefing at a café, I voiced my enthusiasm about Machida. Wasn’t he exactly the sort of person the company was looking for? A gung-ho ambassador, an innovator, an optimist? The Airbnb researchers nodded yes, but Suda, the translator, emphatically shook her head no, declaring that Mach
ida would never make it as a Tokyo businessman. He was too brazen, she suggested, too casual in the way he spoke about making change and making money. “You’re not supposed to get rich fast,” she said. “That’s just Japan.”

  One night, on my way back up Love Hotel Hill, I decided to stop into Pub Slow Jam for a beer. It was a Monday and the eve of some sort of holiday in Japan. People were setting off firecrackers in the streets; spiky-haired teenage boys wandered around in leather jackets, girls tottered on high heels, everyone shouting into the night and snapping photos with their cell phones. Music blared from the trinket shops. The pachinko parlors had their doors open, plinking and pulsing with light. I thought that maybe Pub Slow Jam would be lively, that I might find some people to chat with in English there. But when I entered, it was a forlorn, low-ceilinged establishment with a few stools, a Formica bar, and K-pop playing in the background. A lone couple sat at the far end of the bar quietly sipping drinks, possibly gearing up for a Love Hotel experience. When I glanced at them, they looked away. The bartender greeted me in Japanese, and I said hello back—I had mastered that much—but otherwise there was nothing more either of us could say. I drank my beer in solitude, paid the bill, and went home, back to my miniature room.

  Ultimate Tokyo-Sized Experience!! felt less strange than it once did. I sat on my futon, as I had every night, reading the day’s news on my laptop, the world’s uncertainties writ large: Ebola was raging. There were hostages in Syria. The Nigerian schoolgirls were still missing. And off the coast of Japan, a typhoon swirled ominously in the Pacific.

  Around me, the building was silent—weirdly silent for its location in Shibuya, for the riotous partying going on in the streets that night. If Airbnb was going to grow in Japan, it occurred to me that it might sprout faster in places like this—in cheap impersonal residences in the city center as opposed to in the close-knit residential neighborhoods we’d been visiting. My room was next to the elevator on the third floor, which when I first arrived concerned me, until I realized it was either a very quiet elevator or else there was nobody using it. Immediately next to my door was an identical door, and right next to that door was another. The building was open in the center, so you could look up and down and see the other floors. There were maybe seven floors in the building, maybe 12 doors on every floor. I got the feeling that behind each one was a place as simple and compact as mine, like cabins on a cruise ship.