On my first day in Tokyo, I had bad experience at the Tokyo Station. I had a big, heavy suitcase and a heavy backpack with me and I wasn’t able to find a map (in English) or make sense of where to go for an hour or so amongst the ocean of thousands of people commuting through the station at any given moment. So I decided to eat and settle down in an expensive bagel shop. Fortunately, one of the lovely waitresses there gave me a thorough direction for the JR trains I needed to catch to Minami-senju, the station closest to my accommodation in Taito-ku. So for a day or so, I dreaded to go on a trip on a JR train or subway by myself.

So on one free day, I decided to spend the day exploring the Tokyo JR/Metro system and was prepared to get lost. Fortunately again, the ticket officer at the Minami-senju Station could understand English I spoke and I his Japanese! Then I embarked on the holy grail of the train stations, Shinjuku Station. I saw Shinjuku Station from the outstide on the bus from Kyoto and was stunned by the sheer size of the station (it looked like a spaceship to me!)

On my trip to Shinjuku Station, I took a Hibiya metro train down to Ginza and changed to Marunouchi Line to Shinjuku. It’s around 40-minute trip in the metro that me and my fellow passengers retracted ourselves from the outside world into our own little space. It’s an interesting kind of personal space that people tend to retreat into with this sheer volume of people, so close, squishing together esp peak hours. The crazy Yamanote Line which runs in a loop around inner Tokyo is notorious about how crowded it could be. I was told that at peak hours, there’ll be station officers to push people into the train, packing in passengers like sardines. I was in the Yamanote once around 6 pm. We dutifully packed ourselves into the train. Shoulders, arms and legs occasionally rubbed against one another. It’s just the way it is.  

In 2008, Tokyo has a population of around 12 million in the city area and the population of the surrounding area which is often classified as greater Tokyo is approximately 32-35 million (source: WikiAnswers.com), whereas the population of the whole of Australia is around 21 million in the same year…

Back on the metro, at any given time I looked at people randomly, I would see somebody falling asleep. I’ve heard that they have to work so hard to survive, pay rent and bills, etc. Or maybe oxygen gets thinner in the crowded train carriage. But here we were, anonymous in this crowd, sharing the same space in the train, however internally we’re in our own world. My mind wandered miles off. I thought of an old friend from university in Bangkok who’s had breast cancer. She also has a young child. I was wondering how she went with her operation to remove a tumour recently and why she never replied my emails. We were close friends and we worked together on almost every projects at landscape architecture school.  I remembered she had a cheerful personality even when spoken to my sister about her illness, but perhaps deep down, who knows? She’d be ok, only an operation this time, I thought. Also a guy I had a huge crush on, who was also a landscape architect, recently died of cancer…O, mortality…

So the anonymous me went on to explore the Shinjuku Station for about 3 hours. I only covered the West Gate end of the station complex. I didn’t even go outside the station yet. The fashion here is to die for!  Lucky I didn’t bring my credit card with me on that day!

Tokyo’s department stores must have got everything you can ever imagine. I even saw expensive packs of prosciutto, then a few stalls down the busy walkway, there’re expensive packs of figs.  Then there’s a fancy bread shop with imaginative pastries. Flower shops, ‘new age’ beauty parlour, small restaurants with menus on the vending machine, so I’d pay to the vending machine to get my order and I handed it to the kitchen myself, etc. All of this was still in the Shinjuku Station complex.

I’ve been here for a few weeks, been in Kyoto, knowing Japan somewhat. The sun, the clear blue sky from my hotel room is like everywhere else in the world. In the trains, or in my three-tatami-size hotel room, I’m internalised with my more familiar self, possibly to avoid claustophobia. All is good so far. But when I go outside, the retraction into myself into my own world is really obvious to me. My external world right now is full of fascination, like I were Alice in the Wonderland: every time I go out of my room, the world is different. Again I have to face with the enormity of the unfamiliar world. Particularly for foreigners, it must be so easy to get disorientated in this town….

Also one of the special talents of the crowd in Tokyo trains is their clockwork-like ability to commute, even while retracting themselves into their own world. On a metro trip, I was probably the only one who looked around, checked people out. I spot one girl sitting almost opposite to me. As she sat down, she immediately pulled out her mobile phone and checked things on it (typical).  Then she slowly and gradually fell asleep while her mobile was in her hands. She actually sat next to one cool dude. They’d make such a cute couple, I thought. They fell asleep almost at the same time.  Their heads bopped up and down together with the rhythm of the train moving. It’s hard to believe they’re complete strangers.  Then, amazingly, she woke up just about 2 seconds before her station was announced. She brushed her hair off her face and was fully awaken really quickly and got off at her station. Couldn’t have been better timing!

The cool dude was still sleeping though. He did similar thing when the metro approached his station.

It seems that in crowded places in Tokyo, the physical personal space is very small, but the mental distance are very far.  Strangers can touch skin to one another, but there seems to be a thick invisible wall shielding themselves from one another’s inner world. Yet the display of affection like intentionally touching each other is rare. That is also true in movement improvisation as Chico Katsube of C.I.co. + CIFJ (Contact Improvisation Festival of Japan) told me that she has to make an conscious effort to sort of asking permission to physically contact the other body during improvisation if he/she is Japanese. Whereas for us contemporary dancers of the rest of the world, the wall that shields our personal space isn’t so thick…

Shibuya is …I’ve never seen so many people in my life…!  Why else would you go to Shibuya unless you work there or go shopping. You go there, or I go there, because it’s where people are. For us foreigners who live in a much less populated city than Tokyo, it’s mesmerising to just watch people. There are wave of them at any given time coming out of the Shibuya metro and JR station, onto Hachiko Plaza (click here for the full story of Hachiko the dog) then the 5-street crossing in the Shibuya footage. The crossing is where marketing people try to expose all sorts of products to “people” who cross the junction, loading and loading all the senses in the process. I guess people are used to the noise, the products and other people. So I find the moment when there’re no cars or people on the crossing quite intriguing…

Not far from Shibuya, it’s Harajuku where the infamous “decorative young people” turn up for their ritual outing on Sundays. I caught a few footage of them plus odd things there. Omotesando-dori, often refered to as Tokyo’s Champs-Elysees, where designers shops are, was packed everytime I was there. People actually buy those expensive designer stuff, not like Collins St (the Paris end) in Melbourne where Hermes or Chanel shops are usually empty, but still in business somehow. A beautiful black (of course!) cotton dress I adored at Ann Demeulmeester cost 100,000 yens (around A$ 1230)! So I passed that one. Many girls in Tokyo have a sort of status-symbol Louis Vuitton bags on display especially on Sundays like this.

Having mentioned about the boring Louis Vuitton, I really like the traditional Japanese way of carrying your belongings such as the geisha bags that you can find in many souvenir shops in Kyoto and Tokyo, or they uses square materials or scarf and tying opposite ends on top of each other. There’s a shop at Tadao Ando-designed Omotesando Hills (on B2 floor, I think) that capitalise on these traditional ideas and create contemporary casual accessories that are really cool…

The fascinating thing about the old Tokyo of traditional rituals and the new status-symbol Tokyo is clashed at the end of my Harajuku footage below. There’s a Mikoshi 神輿 pocession at the Omotesando-Aoyama corner. Mi 神is from kami (same kanji), meaning God and koshi 輿 means carriage. So it’s the procession of the God Carriage, which ended in front of Loewe shop, juxtaposing the Mikoshi with the Loewe model reclining on expensive couch, in her expensive shoes, bags, dress, jewelleries, stockings, nail polish and eye lashes…the works!