Losing My Japonaiserie

JR Lines

All the clichés about the Tokyo subway system (Japan Rail, or JR) are true: it is clean, quiet, wildly on time. There is no head splitting screech as the train pulls in to the station, just a silent and somehow hydraulic tension. No one talks on their cell phones in the cars, and it seemed a tacit maxim that to do so would be in terrible taste.  As a New Yorker visiting Japan for the first time, I couldn’t help but become mesmerized by all this, especially given what an unrelenting shit show is the MTA subway system. Even the JR Line equivalent of New York City’s Metro Card—the green and silver “Suica” cards, which have a picture of a dancing penguin on them—are sturdier and less prone to demagnetizing breakage (and they are fun—my son’s “youth” card emitted a digitized chirp as he swiped it through, which the adult cards didn’t have). Many of the subway stations have brushed black marble floors with pixilated messages scrolling over them, orange lanterns flanking the entrances to high end shops selling beautifully packaged pastries or the latest audio gadgets. When the platform gets crowded passengers line up single file in front of each car, a practice that could not be more different from Manhattan platforms  with their pile ups of bodies forcing desperate bottle necks, often with a hand or foot dangling from a door, leading an exhausted conductor to berate the packed cars through a blaring PA system. In Tokyo, even subway corridors under construction are pleasant. Where repair or renovation is in progress a taut, grey cellophane is hung around the workspace. Others have slabs of spotless canvas tied together with lengths of white rope. Only the faintest evidence of construction work could be made out behind these mysterious curtains. In one case I thought I heard whizzing, as of tiny saws or drills.

Japonaiserie

The above is, I realize, a tendentious series of comparisons, and commits the usual error of the provincial New Yorker who blithely treats Manhattan is the standard benchmark for all urban experience. However it is unavoidable for a New Yorker who has never set foot in Japan to resort to this constant Tokyo-NYC calibrating technique, and I’m afraid it will occur throughout this piece. Like many Americans (I assume) I’ve cobbled together over the years a fantasy idea of Japan through a certain kind of cultural consumerism: a childhood obsession with ninjas and ninja weaponry; the “Chiba City” of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the Tokyo-fied sets of Blade Runner, undergraduate discovery of films by Kurasawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi, the novels of...