postcards from japan

Snippets from two weeks in Japan in October, although I documented far more through my camera than my iPhone notes app.

I arrive sleepless in Tokyo at precisely rush hour. My first experience of the city is on an utterly packed train of schoolgirls and salarymen, sunlight streaming through the windows as we chug through the suburbs pressed cheek to cheek. An old man thrusts his arm through the forest of heads bent over phones to grab an overhead handle, pushing my suitcase aside, pulling out his phone to play mahjong for the next eight stops. There is no etiquette on these trains - or an etiquette so specific and utterly divorced from anything else I experience in Japan or even the Victoria line that it’s hard to identify. We pass a sprawling mass of graves woven into the fabric of the houses around it, tall slim headstones weaving between alleyways and clearings, before skyscrapers start thrusting through every square of ground.

Sound and smell of the rain, seeing it patter into the bay. Drip of coffee and clouds descending over the hills. Winding down from the Tatari Bridge suspended high above the water, one afternoon in golden hour, the next morning absolutely drenched and gently freewheeling with the brakes on, avoiding fallen leaves as autumn arrived overnight. Ripening lemons and oranges everywhere, shocks of orange against the leaden grey of the sky and lush rain-drenched greens. Japanese crows, enormous and booming, perched on unprotected fruit branches pecking out the flesh and leaving bright and empty peels hanging like Christmas baubles. Splashes of purple of the impossibly vibrant flowers, and creeping red of a late autumn.

We see a woman in Hiroshima being taken out of the station on a stretcher with no fewer than ten paramedics. I cycle past a teenager in Kyoto who had clearly committed some transgression with his bicycle, surrounded by four police assisting or perhaps punishing him. Four Japanese women leap up to help me pick up my coins and headphones and pieces of paper when I dropped my bag in a quiet breakfast restaurant.

Ploughing through countryside on the bullet train, traditional houses scattered in valleys below forested mountains. The clouds hang low over the hills above a sea of traditional sloped tiled rooves, long greenhouses and marching lines of pylons broken up by the thwack of a Shinkansen zooming in the opposite direction. Tiny cemetery plots and factories and farms, but all neatly delineated, the speed of the train marking everything out from each other. So tidy. Graveyards crawling up the hills every few minutes. The global impulse to build shrines and memorials on high ground, to be looked down upon by your ancestors.

Cycling gently through dusk in Nara’s old town, still tipsy from our sake tasting even after a huge lunch set of mystery items in tiny bowls from a tatami mat cafe. Lights flicking on in the blue hour, one of my favourite times of day to photograph, but I’m out of high speed film. The hills in the distance turning purple.

Sat on the banks of the river in Kyoto beside my bicycle, opposite scores of people sitting on the correct side for the best view of the sunset. A lone fisherman in galoshes stands in the centre with his rod, a bird of prey scaring off the crows above. The sky breaks into pinks and yellows even within my less auspicious sightline, staining the surface of the water. I get lost on my cycle back, weaving through the huge crossings of the city where the lights seem to take eons to change, neon signage snapping on down the huge boulevards. While I wait at a junction I see a masked man dismount his bicycle at shrine inches away from the traffic, praying for 20 seconds before cycling away into a riverside sunset. When I get back to the hotel I realise I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitos.

We snake through the mountains around Hakone on a packed bus, condensation slick on the fogged windows, torrential rain outside. Layers of cloud and damp foliage as we wind further and further upwards, glimpses of rope bridges over cavernous drops and the sea in the far distance. When we disembark we’re soaked instantly. Surrounded by silence other than water running downhill and steam emerging from manholes. This area is somehow both packed with tourists and almost abandoned. Entrances to hotels and guesthouses line the road, but it’s also empty; overrun with vegetation, dotted with rusting gas canisters and overgrown garden gates, trees leaning over each other between the houses. There are luxury hotels and completely rundown cafés; empty karaoke rooms and menus with branches grown across them and curtains pulled aside.

Later that night I step out into the cold and crisp night towards the public onsen. Dead leaves crunch beneath my bare feet, my body gliding through October chill like a knife through butter as steam rises off me. Sinking down into the hot springs with a tightening chest, an intense feeling of both relief and pain to the sounds of night birds and crickets. At dinner we drink a local sake called 月が綺麗ですね: “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?”. Our waiter tells us it’s a poetic way of saying I love you.

Tokyo is an exercise in overwhelm, particularly alone. Overwhelmed by the metro, by the camera district, by the neon ocean of Shinjuku and the warren of bars in the golden gai, by the goshamon machines and all the different combinis and attempting every lunch combination possible, by the sheer scale of a metropolis so much bigger than any I’ve ever been in before. Soothed by the claustrophobic embrace of my capsule hotel, by the silent slurping around me in a noodle shop, by watching the oil pool in a spoon of warm chicken broth.

I walk around the city’s hugest graveyard alone, grey headstones and flashes of yellow flowers - also comforting in a new and alien place . I go and see a different horror film three nights in a row at the Godzilla cinema in Shinjuku - something else I find comforting. I order different popcorns and combinations of fried chicken. The seats are arranged in benches so that every time there’s a jump scare the whole row shakes. The entire audience sits through the entirety of the credits and in the bathroom afterwards rows of teenage girls in miniskirts crowd around the mirrors doing their make up.

I visit a sleepy suburb to go to a particular gallery. It’s drizzling - a familiar scent comes off the tarmac, sheets and futon hung out to dry get slowly damper and bicycles with baskets full of shopping move slowly past. I’m overtaken by a lone seven-year-old with his baseball bat poking out of his rucksack. Huge purple flowers that bewitched us on our cycle through the islands spill out over fencing surrounding an unused tennis court, their petals scattered across the asphalt. I catch glimpses of families enjoying noodles in their tiny gardens, well-kept stone pathways picked out in gravel frontyards.

I cross a vast pedestrian crossing in the heart of Shinjuku behind a hip man in cargo pants and wired headphones. Halfway across someone greets him through the throng, pausing in recognition and opening his mouth to speak. My man acknowledges him briefly as they pass but pushes forward, indicating the crowd around us - almost instantly the other stranger is gone. But as his head turns back forward there’s a flicker in his face. When we get to the other side he puts a hand to his head, the other tensing into a fist before he’s lost in the crowd. It felt like a vignette onto a large story, Tokyo is millions of these vignettes everywhere all at once. A disco ball rotates in a tower far above the junction, throwing flashes out into the night, the window high up enough that nothing within is visible. Every other window is dark.

I’ve run out of socks. A bartender tells me that the hip young people in Japan like to wear the distinctive socks sold in FamilyMart, green and blue stripes peeking over their sneakers - “they find it cool and casual”. I buy a pair with my post-drinking egg mayo sandwich at 3am, and seeing those stripes above my docs in a coffee shop the next morning I do indeed feel cool and casual.

My last meal is in a gyoza isakaya, in between a young family whose son has baby chopsticks, and a crowd of drunk salarymen turning redder and louder as they order rounds of highballs and spill them over each other. A table of Chinese creatives in the corner gets rowdier, and two friends join them awkwardly clearly not expecting the atmosphere they’ve entered into.

Stepping out of my hotel at 5 am to go and catch my flight I’m greeted by the sound of multiple screamed karaoke from tiny bars on first floors of alleyways, by a circus of rats running a few feet ahead, by schools of circling taxis waiting for drunk revellers to take home. Anywhere in London at 5am would feel unspeakably early, especially on a Tuesday - cleaners going to work and a city waking up. In Tokyo the bars are open 6 pm till 6 am. Signage for 24 hour shops lights up my walk to the metro station, another day in Japan beginning even though it’s my last. Not my last forever. I really hope that my time in Japan has only just begun.