Given a street to play in, kids will never choose a park. The park is blocks away, and we want to play right now. In most of America, playing in the street is assumed to be suicidal. When I was growing up in Portland, Oregon, in the eighties, we lived on a quiet residential street on the outskirts of town, and my brothers and I played in the street when we could get away with it, but my most vivid memory of street play is my dad getting into a shouting match with a crazy driver who almost plowed into us as he screamed down the street in his Mercedes. We used to say “go play in traffic” to mean “go fuck yourself.”
On our street in Nakano, playing in the street is just what kids do. It’s assumed to be safe because it is safe. Residential streets in Nakano are narrow and don’t have sidewalks. Cars are welcome, and pedestrians and bikes are expected to get out of the way to let them pass, but the cars slink along so slowly, it’s as if they’re embarrassed.
Immediately after we moved in, Iris met Zen, who lived in our building and who was every inch the word “boy” in human form. Zen was five and spoke no English other than “hello!” and “see you!” Iris spoke very little Japanese. This, of course, didn’t interfere with their play at all. Minutes after meeting, they stole tomato stakes from Zen’s parents’ garden and started fencing. They played tag; they played baseball; they shot each other with plastic or imaginary guns; they sprayed each other with the hose. At any time of day, Zen would appear below our balcony, yelling “IRIS-CHAN!” or ring our doorbell six hundred times. One night, to Iris’s delight, he set off a bunch of fireworks in the alley. Naming him “Zen” was presumably wishful thinking.
Summoned by Zen, Iris would run out to play in the street. If Iris didn’t feel like playing, Zen would bellow her name for ten minutes before giving up. I’m glad I rarely had to intervene in this relationship, because Zen found my broken Japanese hilarious. Anything I said, he would repeat like it was the funniest thing ever, probably because I said something like, “Iris Zen play very good, yes? But we go dinnering now.”
Zen had a little sidekick named Kōtarō. I never heard him speak. He always seemed to be standing just behind Zen and to the side, grinning like a maniac. If they were characters in a comic, Zen would be the mouth and Kōtarō the muscle. Admittedly, Kōtarō weighed about forty pounds, but he had the attitude down. There were also a couple of girls who lived across the street and came out to play sometimes. American parents who bemoan the rise of the play date and the demise of spontaneous play should visit Japan. Many aspects of suburban Tokyo life are ripped from wistful American memoirs and Richard Scarry books. One morning we walked with Zen and his mother to kindergarten, and shopkeepers and people on the street kept hailing us to say good morning. One man leaned out of his store to say, “Zen, bōshi wa doko desu ka?” Zen, where’s your hat? His mother half-smiled and held up the hat.
Like many people in the neighborhood, Zen’s parents are avid vegetable gardeners, and they kept us supplied with homegrown cucumbers. Supermarket cucumbers in Japan are superb; just-picked cucumbers are revelatory. Plus, they come with the free spectacle of opening the door to Zen with a cucumber in each hand, sheepishly offering them forth. Is there any facial expression more universal than my parents are making me do this embarrassing thing?
Laurie bought Zen’s family a gift to thank them for all the cucumbers: a cucumber-print tenugui hand cloth, meticulously gift-wrapped. She gave it to Iris and said, “Would you please take this to Zen and make sure he gives it to his parents?” Iris shrugged at the idea of trying to make Zen do anything, but she took the gift bag and headed downstairs.
About ten minutes later, we came down and followed a trail of torn wrapping paper to find Zen in the street, the cucumber tenugui draped around his neck, totally pimped out, shouting commands to Kōtarō and exhorting Iris to blow off dinner and come play instead.
Children in Japan are free to do much more than simply play in the street. You see unaccompanied minors on the train constantly, usually girls in their navy blue school uniforms heading to or from school, or evening cram school, or activities. Not just thirteen-year-olds, but plenty of street-smart eight-year-olds riding and walking fearlessly through the world’s busiest train system.
Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid moved with his family to Tokyo in the nineties. Shortly after they arrived, his daughter begged him to let her and her friend, both ten years old, go to Tokyo Disneyland. Sure thing, said Reid, who promptly called the friend’s mom and offered to chaperone the outing. “Huh?” said the perplexed mom. He ended up letting the kids go solo, which is what his daughter had been asking for all along. The kids had a great time, certainly more so than if Dad had come along.
Parents in Tokyo aren’t afraid of crime or car accidents, and they have little reason to be. The largest city in the world is also among the safest. I’m among the least crime-obsessed Americans I know, but in Tokyo even I had to slip into a different mindset. Worrying about being the victim of a crime in Tokyo is a waste of mental energy on par with worrying about being struck by lightning, and slowly you begin to realize how many of our decisions are circumscribed by the probability that someone is going to interfere with us. Wouldn’t it be nice to leave our computers unattended at a cafe, carry around plenty of cash, and send our eight-year-olds to pick up a bunch of leeks? (Oddly, bike theft is common in Japan, but nobody uses U-locks.)
The Japanese know that sending their kids out unaccompanied is an exceptional privilege, and they made a popular TV show about it. On First Errands, extremely young kids are sent out, under the eye of a camera crew, on implausible errands. A two-year-old girl goes to the supermarket for milk and gyōza sauce. The bag is too heavy for her to carry, so she drags it along the ground, and the milk carton bursts open and starts leaking. (Every episode of First Errands features a moment where any parent watching the show will burst into tears.) Sobbing, the girl returns to the store, and the folks at the service desk help her tape up the milk and send her home to her parents.
So we started sending Iris and her coin purse to Life Supermarket. We told her she could stop for water at Vending Machine Corner and buy herself a treat at the store. You’ve never seen a kid more proud than Iris returning from her first solo visit to Life with a plastic-wrapped tray of fruit. “And I brought back 2 yen in change,” she reported. The fruit tray featured an apple, a grapefruit, an orange, a kiwi, and some fake paper leaves. I would never have bought a fruit tray, which is exactly the point. Dad wasn’t there to say something dumb like, “We can choose our own fruit assortment.”
We sent Iris to Life a couple of times a week, mostly for vegetables. She often bought herself a package of Hi-Chew or Choco Baby candy. Soon she started arguing that she could easily go to Aigre-Douce, our favorite patisserie, by herself, too. “I know exactly how to get there,” said Iris. “Chūō Rapid to Shinjuku, change to the Yamanote line, get off at Mejiro, walk down Mejiro-dōri...” And I’m sure she was right, but we were too American to let her try it. Given another couple of months, though, I’m sure we would have relented.
Crush Hour
時間を急ぐ
“This isn’t crush hour either,” complained Iris. We were on the Chūō Rapid, our favorite of Tokyo’s myriad train lines. Its orange-striped cars arrive at platforms 7 and 8 of Nakano Station every three to four minutes, all day, every day, and it could not be more magical if it left from platform 9¾.
Tokyo is a railroad town. It’s hard to say anything about Tokyo trains without resorting to cliches and getting worked up like a fanboy trainspotter. The system is massive: more than one hundred train lines serving nearly nine hundred stations, and you can carry one digital smart card (called PASMO or Suica) that opens the gates to all of them. The heart of the system is the Yamanote line, an above-ground circle line with distinctive green-striped cars that look like life-size toy trains. The Yamanote loop takes about an hour to go all the way around and serves most of Tokyo’s most important and best-known stations: Shinjuku, Shibuy
a, Harajuku, Tokyo, Ueno, and so on.
The Yamanote line carries more passengers per day than the entire London Underground, and it’s where Iris and I first encountered crush hour. White-gloved attendants still work in Tokyo train stations, but they no longer push passengers onto trains, because the passengers have mastered the art of, for lack of a better word, self-cramming. Tokyo straphangers are nothing if not orderly. Marks on the platform indicate where the train doors will alight; passengers line up here, step aside to let people off, then sweep onto the train with a minimum of colliding and sniping.
The other day I was on the bus in Seattle. All the seats were taken, and most passengers had to stand. The bus driver kept exhorting people to move toward the back to make room for more passengers. “There’s no room to move back,” people grumbled. In Tokyo, well, no one complains publicly in the first place, but on any train, no matter how sardined, there’s always room to get cozy and make room for a few more. The first time Iris and I found ourselves in the midst of this Vise-Grip of humanity, her face went from relaxed to terrified to elated in the space of ten seconds. In a crush hour train, hands go up. Surrender. As entertainment, it’s hard to do better for a $2 ticket.
In the midst of this humid press of bodies, those lucky enough to secure a bench seat tend to celebrate by falling asleep. It’s common to look across the train car and see an entire row of people nodding off, like hobos on boxcars, except these are well-dressed, sober professionals of all ages and both sexes, at all times of day. Sleep seems to hunt them down and overtake them. How do they wake up before their stop? I never figured it out. People also sleep in parks. This public narcolepsy is, like a bug-eyed anime doll, both cute and unnerving. Tokyo’s subway sleepers square too well with stereotypes about the Japanese working themselves to death. Then again, I fell asleep on the train a few times myself.
The Chūō line cuts east-west across the circle of the Yamanote, forming the London Underground symbol on the idealized transit map. It’s a busy line, carrying crush loads in certain places at certain times, but mostly it’s just a nice train. Nakano is far enough from the city center that we sometimes even got a seat. I enjoyed the surprisingly comprehensible station and transfer announcements in Japanese and English, and I especially liked the ads. Colorful display ads hawked boring urban stuff like insurance and continuing education and cell phones, but also TV shows like the cop comedy Beginners (“BIGINAAZU!”) and the romantic drama Breathless Summer. A wholesome-looking middle-aged woman starred in a series of ads for bean-flavored popsicles which focused on their health-giving (which I assume means “constipation-relieving”) properties.
Each train car featured a TV screen built into the side of the car running mostly food ads. Every time I saw the 7-Eleven ad showing a family gathered around the chain’s summer noodle salad, I wanted to be that family, and soon enough, we were. (It was pretty good.) In another ad, a guy in a tuxedo leaned against the counter at McDonald’s. I never quite figured out what was going on there. (The commercials don’t have audio, just closed captioning, thank God.) Everybody bemoans the omnipresence of commercial messages in modern life; I’ve certainly asked why we have to give self-interested marketing goons a captive audience on our public conveyances. Tokyo probably has more commercial messages per square foot than anywhere in America, but you know what? It sure beats Poetry on Buses.
Riding the train in Tokyo isn’t always a picnic. Some of the newer subway lines, like the Oedo line, are dug insanely deep and require descending an unnervingly long series of escalators to get to the platform. Every time we rode one of these subterranean monstrosities, I thought about the Chilean miners.
Riding the Shinkansen, however, is literally a picnic. Every Shinkansen trip departing Tokyo originates at Tokyo Station, an imposing Renaissance-style building whose main facade somehow survived World War II. Inside, uniformed workers push metal carts stacked with mysterious cardboard boxes up and down the corridors. It’s not luggage. Eventually, Laurie figured out that they’re delivering bento boxes to the dozens of shops selling them.
Ekiben (“train station bento”) are a tradition as old as train travel in Japan. While eating on subways and commuter trains in Tokyo is a bad act, eating on the intercity bullet train is celebrated. There’s a hierarchy of bento quality. The kiosks on the train station platforms sell the cheapest and lowest-quality bento, although applying the term “lowest-quality” to any food in Japan is an unfair slur. I’ve certainly enjoyed these bargain ekiben, which usually contain rice (often decorated with a single umeboshi, said to prevent spoilage and resemble the Japanese flag), pickles, some kind of cooked vegetable or salad, and a main dish like cold fried chicken or tonkatsu or ginger pork or dried fish.
As you get farther from the tracks, the bento become more varied, expensive, and exquisite. If you’re feeling flush, you can step outside the station and into a department store, where the basement food halls sell impeccable bento for $30 and up.
My favorite place to shop for train food at Tokyo Station, however, is the deli complex inside the station, which offers a wide variety of bento, plus individual items so you can build your own deconstructed bento, which is what I did on this trip. I bought a box of hot nikuman, which are like those fluffy white steamed Chinese pork buns but with a seasoned ground pork filling instead of gooey barbecued pork, and a plastic tub of assorted root vegetables: kabocha squash, carrots, taro, bamboo shoots, lotus root, burdock, and more, all perfectly cooked and seasoned. Iris had a tonkatsu bento, and Laurie had a fried chicken one that also featured potato salad. She described the combination as “sort of American and totally Japanese.”
Another popular train food is the katsu-sando, or tonkatsu sandwich, which is a cold pork cutlet with tonkatsu sauce on crustless white bread. I’ve never been into American cold sandwiches, but sometimes I get a katsu-sando craving.
My stomach hasn’t quite come around to the idea of eating lunch while shooting down the track at 180 miles per hour. Most people find the Shinkansen’s tracks so highly polished and the trains so aerodynamic and hermetically enclosed that speed is only an idea. My middle ears have never been entirely cooperative, and I find a Shinkansen ride more like being shot out of a cannon. This is not a complaint. It’s the bullet train, for God’s sake; I want to feel at least a little queasy.
About an hour into the ride, we caught a ten-second glimpse of the peak of Mount Fuji, naked of snow in the summertime, and then clouds drew a modest cloak over the mountain and it was gone. That was our only Fuji view of the entire trip. This is also as it should be. Tokyoites, I think, enjoy complaining about not being able to see Mount Fuji much more than they would enjoy being able to see it all the time. Seattleites have the same relationship with the sun.
My favorite part of the Shinkansen experience has nothing to do with food and doesn’t even require getting on the train. Stand on the platform in a small town station, and soon an express train will come screaming through at full speed, in and out of the station in five seconds without stopping. The train gives off an earsplitting insect hum. It seems like you’re watching something physically impossible, like a person lifting a house, or hearing a joke so funny the laughter threatens to rip you apart, and then, with a puff of air, it’s over.
When I was in high school, my friends and I sometimes got bored enough to drive out to the airport to watch planes take off. If it had been a Shinkansen platform, we never would have come home.
Yakitori
焼き鳥
Immediately after the war, underworld gangs opened markets at all three of the mouths [of Shinjuku train station], west, south, and east. Traces of that at Westmouth yet survive, in the cluster of one and two-story “barracks” known popularly and affectionately as Piss Alley (Shomben Yokochō). It would much prefer that the public call it Chicken Alley, for skewered chicken is, along with alcohol, the commodity it chiefly purveys, but the public does not oblige.
—Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo from Edo to
Shōwa
Our yakitori story begins, in fact, at Piss Alley.
Actually, it begins at our Nakano apartment. One night around bedtime (living in what was basically a one-room apartment meant we almost always went to sleep at the same time), I said good night to Laurie and Iris and headed out into Tokyo. I hopped the express train to Shinjuku, still full of bodies at 9 p.m. and still running every four minutes. I stepped off the train, out of the station and into a warren of chicken shacks that would now prefer that the public call it Omoide Yokochō, or Memory Alley. I’d bet a large bottle of Sapporo that everybody still calls it Piss Alley.
Piss Alley is actually two perpendicular alleys. Tourists and salarymen weave around each other and through clouds of fragrant meat smoke. As I strolled through, I looked for a free seat at a counter and finally took one. “You speak Japanese?” asked the cook. “I don’t speak any English.”
“That’s cool,” I said. I did not actually say that. I said, “Daijōbu desu,” which is pronounced “dye-jobe-dess” and is perhaps the single most useful phrase in Japanese after “sumimasen,” (“I’m sorry.”) Daijōbu desu means I’m OK, it’s OK, that’s fine, don’t worry about it. I said it with confidence despite the fact that I did not, technically, speak Japanese as well as a two-year-old. There were two white guys already at the counter. I figured I could get away with it.
I’d come to Piss Alley to eat chicken, drink beer, and piss in an alley. I only managed one, because (a) I was kidding about pissing in an alley, and (b) I happened to sit down at a pork restaurant. I ordered a bottle of lager, a skewer of pork with negi, and a skewer of zucchini. “Where are you guys from?” I asked the Westerners.
“Belgium,” said one.
“Bulgaria,” said the other.
It’s probably good that I didn’t reply, “Those are two different places?” or “You guys must love that Bulgarian drinkable yogurt,” because each of these guys weighed about two of me. They worked for a Japanese company, but didn’t want to talk about exactly what they did, because that’s what you talk about at work, not during pork and beer hour. They asked me how long I’d been in Japan. “A week,” I said. This provoked much laughter. They’d been in the country for over two years and didn’t seem too happy about it.
Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo Page 7