Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo (8 page)

Not much is old in Tokyo, but the street pattern is, and makes Tokyo seem warmer and cozier than Nagoya, a much smaller city.

—Edward Seidensticker,
Tokyo from Edo to Shōwa

A few years ago I
was on a Seattle city board devoted to pedestrian issues. (And let me tell you, we weighed in on some
pedestrian
issues.) A lot of our time was spent advocating for building sidewalks in neighborhoods that didn’t have any. Well, most streets in our Tokyo neighborhood of Nakano don’t have sidewalks and don’t need them.

If you’ve seen pictures of Tokyo streets, like the teeming Shibuya Crossing or the city’s other Times Square–like districts (Shinjuku, Akihabara, and so on), it’s easy to get the idea that the whole city looks like that, or that the only respite from urban hyperintensity is to visit a temple or shrine. This is not true at all. Even in the center city districts, if you walk a couple of blocks off the major arterial, the bustle and crush fade quickly.

Tokyo has a bizarre street address system, so arcane that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was designed during the Edo period to confuse foreign invaders. Each district is divided into neighborhoods, and each neighborhood is divided into multiblock parcels called
chome
(cho-meh). Within each chome, the blocks are numbered, and on each block, the buildings are numbered. But they’re not necessarily numbered in order: building #1 might be between #17 and #24. This means any street address in Tokyo is an incomprehensible string of numbers (building/block/chome). Nobody other than the post office actually navigates by street address; people use landmarks and mobile phones.

My point isn’t to scare you away from ever visiting Tokyo, which is actually quite easy to navigate. The reason Tokyo doesn’t operate on the lot number/street name system used in American cities is because nonarterial streets in Tokyo, taking a cue from U2,
don’t have names.
Our apartment wasn’t on Cherry Blossom Lane or any other street with a cute name; like most homes, it was on a nameless street.

As you walk from named to nameless streets, the urban quality changes. The named streets are often huge, packed with cars, with wide sidewalks and tons of street-facing businesses, often several floors of them. It’s common, and mouthwatering, to see a tall skinny building with a large sign listing all the restaurants you’ll find on its various floors. (“Yakitori
2F
, Sushi
3F
, Korean BBQ
4F–5F
,” etc.) The nameless streets are skinny, usually wide enough for one car with room for pedestrians or bikes to squeak by either side of it. Everyone shares the road: parents on bikes with one kid in front and another behind; businessmen in white dress shirts and black slacks (summer “cool biz” style) carrying briefcases; schoolgirls and schoolboys in uniform; vigorous-looking elderly people; and the occasional slow-moving car or truck. Every time I saw a Domino’s or Pizza Hut delivery, I laughed, because the vehicle of choice is a tiny scooter outfitted with a pizza trunk. (Also, I laughed because, hey, why would you order Domino’s if you lived in Tokyo?)

No matter how far into the residential area of a neighborhood you walk, the side streets are punctuated by vending machines. You’ve probably heard tales of all the crazy things you can buy in Japanese vending machines, but the golden age of vending diversity, when you could buy sake and books and fetish gear, is mostly gone. Today, nearly all vending machines sell drinks, and in the summer they’re indispensable.

Vending innovation isn’t dead. Some machines use facial recognition software to guess which drink you’re in the mood for (based mostly on your gender and the time of day, I was told). Iris and I always liked to stop at the machine on the Nakano Station platform that dispensed slushy iced drinks like cocoa-strawberry, matcha, and
Ramune.
(Ramune is a soda known for its unusual bottle, which has a glass marble in the neck, and for coming in various flavors like orange, red, and blue, all of which taste the same to me.)

It took about eighty seconds to shave the ice into the cup, which meant we’d miss our train. Luckily, the next train was always three minutes behind. We also enjoyed the occasional touch-screen machine, where the screen took up the entirety of the front panel, like a giant iPad, and you’d tap a life-size depiction of the bottle you wanted to buy.

Most vending machines, however, were like the ones in the cluster near our apartment which we dubbed, inventively enough, Vending Machine Corner. For about $1.50, you could get iced green tea or black tea with milk; various sweetened iced coffee drinks like Boss and (actual brand name) Mt. Rainier: The Mountain of Seattle; sports drinks like Speed Athlete and Pocari Sweat; and our personal favorite, water. The iced tea is tasty, but once I made the mistake of trying hot tea from a machine and received a warm plastic bottle. The tea was lousy, but even if it had been the finest first-growth tea from Uji, drinking from warm plastic
will
make you think of a urine sample.

Occasionally we saw someone refilling a machine, but mostly the vending machines were unattended and ready to serve. Where do they plug in? Who owns them? Life is mystery.

Not all of Tokyo’s nameless side streets are residential. When we took the Tōbu Tōjō line train deep into Saitama Prefecture to visit friends one Sunday, at every brief station stop along the way we could see a
shōtengai
inviting us to throw out our plans.

A shōtengai is a busy pedestrian shopping street, closed or inhospitable to cars. Walk three blocks down a typical shōtengai, and you’ll pass well over a hundred businesses: casual restaurants, convenience stores, record stores, pachinko parlors, used book and record stores, produce stands, clothing shops, all the customary urban mishmash. In Kichijōji one day we took a long detour into a store selling nothing but high-quality clothing buttons, and the place was so charming that even I was into it. My time in that store probably constituted the majority of the time in my entire life I have thought about buttons. On a shōtengai north of Kōenji Station, we ran into a troupe of tipsy comedians mugging for photos.

Years ago I read a quote whose source I’ve been unable to trace. The writer described great urban spaces “where the city holds you in the palm of its hand.” The most important ingredient in that feeling is a pleasant sense of enclosure, of being in what architectural theorist Christopher Alexander calls an
outdoor room.
Tokyo is riddled with this kind of delightful place, and I think it’s what Seidensticker was talking about when he said Tokyo’s street pattern makes it warm and cozy. Those nameless, narrow backstreets, with frequent intersections and diversions, are Tokyo’s fundamental form, and they are arranged into neighborhoods with recognizable personalities.

The Jiyūgaoka neighborhood, for example, can only be described as cute, or, to use the favorite word of every Japanese schoolgirl,
kawaii!
You step out of the train station and into a village of high-end shopping, French bakeries, and international food. Pedestrians mill at train crossings, waiting to let a small commuter train pass, then stream across. On the other side of the tracks is a small strip of park blocks, a bit like Brooklyn or my hometown of Portland, Oregon. And this is
way
out in the suburbs.

Street patterns are amazingly resilient. Tokyo was destroyed twice in the twentieth century, but an old street map would still serve you well. Visitors to Tokyo have no reason to think about street patterns except to curse them when they get lost, but if Tokyo had been rebuilt along modernist lines after World War II, with a grid system and wide streets, I would not be writing this, because the Tokyo that I love would not exist. Some parts of Tokyo, like the area around Tokyo Tower and some of the artificial islands in Tokyo Bay (like Toyosu and Odaiba) provide an ill-proportioned counterexample to the good urban form that pervades most of the city. I find these areas very hard to appreciate. (OK, they suck.)

But these exceptions are rare, and Tokyo has even found ways to accommodate urban features that provoke handwringing and revulsion elsewhere. After an evening walk in our neighborhood of Nakano, Laurie noticed something strange: the three of us had just strolled through an adult entertainment district, and it felt totally family-friendly. “Maid cafes” such as Kuroneco (meaning “black cat” and written in roman characters to be stylish) solicited men looking to spend an evening doted upon by a young woman dressed as a French maid. This is actually more innocent than it sounds—no sex, all doting. Other cafes offered strip shows and possibly more, but as discreetly as you can imagine. There’s a strong proscription in Japanese society against belligerent public drunkenness and other forms of public bad behavior, so whatever naughtiness is going on indoors rarely spills over onto the street. There are enough layers of questions (about feminism, sexual openness and repression, and the international appeal of French maids) to build several onions, and I’m not equipped to peel them, but the point is that our neighborhood catered to a variety of urges, gustatory and otherwise, and was safe and comfortable day and night.

(Yes, of course I considered trying the maid cafe, but chickened out because I was worried the language barrier would be embarrassing. In retrospect, I should have gone in wearing a butler costume and we could have had a whole
Remains of the Day
role-play going on.)

Alain de Botton is that guy with a French name who writes books in English about why modern life doesn’t make us as happy as it should. He’s written books about travel, work, and religion, and a few years ago he wrote a book called
The Architecture of Happiness.
One observation from that book has stuck with me: “[E]ven if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modeled to rival St. Mark’s Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood.”

When you look at a picture of Paris, you want to insert yourself into the scene. That’s you, sitting at the cafe, lingering over a croissant and
café crème.
There you are again, on a bicycle, with a baguette sticking out of your satchel. Strolling down the Champs-Élysées. Kissing beside a fountain. Buying macarons in a rainbow of colors. Like it or not, you’re the star of
Being Jean-Claude Malkovich
.

Even though Tokyo is a superb place to buy a panoply of macarons, photos of Asian cities don’t provoke the same kind of longing, because the cities don’t throw up mansard roofs and ornamented terra cotta in the background of every picture. Most photography books and children’s picture books about Japan are about Mount Fuji, or Japanese gardens, or something, anything, not marred by power lines.

The great stuff about Tokyo is like a vampire: it doesn’t show up in photos. To turn de Botton’s observation on its head, we can be very happy living among ugly buildings.

There is, of course, beautiful traditional architecture in Tokyo, just not very much of it, and what looks old often isn’t. When we arrived in the city from the airport and emerged from the Ginza line station in Asakusa, our first view was dominated by the Kaminarimon (“thunder”) Gate, which marks the entrance to the Sensō-ji temple complex, Tokyo’s most visited attraction. The gate, a towering wooden
torii
complete with a hanging red lantern, looks like it has stood guard for a thousand years. This is essentially true: Kaminarimon was built in 941. What you see in 2013, however, is a 1960 reconstruction. (The current red lantern is from 2003.) But most of Tokyo is not reconstructed temple gates. It’s soot-stained concrete modernism. And it just doesn’t matter.

Tokyo is one of the world’s great walking cities. “Walking on the streets of Tokyo we are aware of a sense of human proportion that we might not have known in the cities whence we came,” writes Donald Richie in
A Lateral View.
“To walk in Tokyo is to wear a coat that fits exceptionally well.” The city assumes you want to enjoy it by foot, bicycle, and train, and it serves up diversions in small doses, like tapas, on every block. As Laurie put it, “Tokyo isn’t beautiful at all, but it’s full of beautiful things.” She didn’t know it, but she was echoing Seidensticker, the city’s foremost English-language historian. “No one could call the Tokyo of our day a fair city,” he wrote, “though it contains beautiful things.”

The pretty little thing that jumped out at us all over town, day after day, was the tenugui. Often translated as “washcloth” or “handkerchief,” a tenugui is a multipurpose piece of cloth used as a headband, or for brow-mopping on a summer day, or (most often) for drying your hands, because hand-drying implements in public bathrooms are rare. Tenugui are as ancient and folkloric as a hand towel can be. Laurie went to an exhibit of
ukiyo-e
woodcuts and paintings, all of which featured cats, many of which were wearing or otherwise using their tenugui.

Meanwhile, I was reading about Manjirō, the first Japanese visitor to America. Shipwrecked during the Edo period, Manjirō was rescued by an American whaling ship whose captain eventually adopted Manjirō as his son. Manjirō eventually returned to Japan and became a samurai at the dawn of the Meiji restoration. The key part of the story: legend has it that throughout his adventures,
Manjirō never lost his tenugui.
And it’s a good thing, because public restrooms in the 19th century almost never had those cool Airblade hand dryers.

Tenugui are for sale everywhere, and each design is more beautiful than the last. Many are both pretty and funny, like the one printed with that eternal symbol of summer, the mosquito coil. At one department store I saw a display of Izod tenugui in rich primary colors, each bearing the little alligator patch. I’m not sure how many tenugui Laurie brought home, but she gave them as gifts for several weeks after our trip, and I have no proof that she’s run out.

Maybe washcloths aren’t your thing. Fine. Beautiful stuff is inescapable in Japan no matter what your pleasure: temples and shrines, stylish clothing, perfect packaging, grand public gardens and miniature flower gardens sprouting on residential corners, the calligraphic swoop of kanji and the spiky angularity of katakana. And I haven’t even mentioned anything food-related. The point is, sure, we all want beauty in our lives, but it doesn’t have to come in architectural form.