Tokyo

We arrived in Karuizawa today, a mountain retreat a bit more than an hour outside Tokyo, where we’ll spend two nights before heading to Hokkaido. It’s ten degrees cooler here than it is in the capital. The mist and the trees, just barely starting to turn orange, feel unexpected and fresh after the past week in Tokyo.

My Japanese has already improved a lot. I won’t be chit-chatting with anyone anytime soon, but it’s enough to get us around restaurants and shops when the staff don’t speak English, which has helped us catch little glimpses of everyday life here.

People say that you can live several lifetimes in New York without seeing all of what the city has to offer. It feels like several lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to fully experience even a single neighborhood in Tokyo. The city stretches on as far as you can see, both horizontally and vertically through the zakkyo biru, making the island of Manhattan feel discrete and contained. At the end of each night, we would walk back home from wherever we happened to be, spending hours carving out one-dimensional lines of our own experience within the three-dimensional cityscape.

Kosupa

We spent a Tuesday night out with one of my Japanese rates salespeople in a tiny izakaya, filled with smoke from the yakitori grill, somewhere that “tourists like us wouldn’t normally make it to”. He had moved to Tokyo as a gaijin after graduating from college in the States almost thirty years ago, and shared all sorts of wisdom with us: the concepts of kosupa (“cost performance”) and hara hachi bu (“eat until you’re 80% full, and stop”), what a real power breakfast is (“rice, raw egg, and some soy sauce”), and what gives meaning to travel—hearing the stories of others and developing a new, shared language with those you travel with.

Borderless

Maybe it was because we were resigned to the impossible vastness of Tokyo, or maybe it was because of the comfort in knowing we had forty days in Japan; whatever it was, we ended up taking our days in the city fairly easy. We didn’t spend much time at the major attractions, and instead spent our mornings finalizing plans for the rest of our time in Japan, and our afternoons and evenings wandering through the city. We weren’t total slackers though; we did make it to both TeamLabs exhibitions, which these days almost seems as “Tokyo” as Tsukiji Market or the Imperial Palace.

Cities within cities

We visited Austin a couple of years ago. Despite being one of America’s most up-and-coming cities, I remember thinking about how the density of energy and excitement in New York made Austin, with its handful of cool restaurants and streets, look like a little town. But K-town suddenly looks more like just a single street once you’ve walked through what could be ten K-towns, filled with izakaya, behind Ueno Station; and Times Square seems just a bit less chaotically vibrant when Shibuya, Kabukicho, and Harajuku are all just as neon-drenched and loud. Each day in Tokyo, we’d walk the length of Manhattan just to barely scratch the surface of a single neighborhood.

Kuromutsu

Near the end of our trip, Alice had a day-long bout of food poisoning and stayed at home to recover while I did a bit of solo-exploring of Tokyo. I went for lunch at a local shokudō recommended by a friend who’s lived in Tokyo for the past twenty years, and managed to navigate my way through the Japanese-only staff and menu to a seat at the counter. The chef’s workstation was elevated so I was eye-level with big, juicy chunks of kuromutsu being grilled over charcoal, shrouded in billowing smoke. The fish was amazing, but feeling like I had found my way into a slice of real life in Tokyo was what made the meal unforgettable. The only possible thing to do after that was to bring Alice back the next day.

Twenty years ahead, thirty years ago

Despite having something like six restaurants for each of New York’s, food delivery is practically non-existent in Tokyo. This might have been one of the only bike deliverymen I saw this week, and I don’t think he was even delivering takeout. Tokyo feels like it was twenty years ahead of the rest of the world, thirty years ago. Almost every toilet has a high-tech bidet, the trains are fast, clean, and punctual, and the onigiri wrappers are impressively “high-tech”. But at the same time, many restaurants are still cash-only, there wasn’t a single electric car or bike lane to be seen, and looking back, I have a hard time coming up with something, technology-wise, that Tokyo seemed to be aheadof the US or China on today, even if it does feels ahead on things like overall quality of life.

Night city

Tokyo, like New York, is a night city, and the yokocho are where Tokyo really feels alive. Golden Gai, where this picture was taken, is the most famous, and filled with hundreds of bars, many of which fit a couple of people (and in this case, “people” seemed to exclusively mean tourists). But these alleyways are everywhere. On Friday night, we had yakisoba and biru at the Ebisu yokocho, next to a couple of tourists mixed in with groups of salarymen rowdily easing their way into the weekend.