Gigantic.49

Let’s Get Lost

I read this in a book:

Go to a new city. Walk one block. When you reach the first corner, decide which direction you will go. Walk another block. At the next corner, decide which direction you will go. Repeat, repeat, repeat, etc. etc.

So long as I didn’t keep turning right and going in circles, the plan, as such, should work exceedingly well in Tokyo.

I kept notes of the things I saw.

A woman wearing a surgical mask walked a chowchow puppy. Twenty-five years before covid, seeing someone on the street in a surgical mask was kinda weird, but in Tokyo, one-in-ten people seemed to be wearing them.

From what I gathered, it was less a fear of catching something, more a fear of giving something to someone else. Exceedingly polite society.

At one particularly busy intersection, there was an amazing X-shaped pedestrian bridge that connected all four corners. At other intersections, women in blue uniforms with matching blue floppy hats waved yellow flags at the end of sticks, blowing whistles so that gaggles of school children wearing matching yellow hats could cross safely.

I veered from from avenues to tiny residential streets to see how people lived, then back to busy streets looking for breakfast. I was getting really hungry, but nothing was open yet.

I found another temple, a wooden one, with a well-worn yard around it. There was a wooden box. I hung back and watched a woman put money into it, ring a bell, then say a little prayer before going on her way. I still had no concept of Japanese money. I put a medium-sized coin in the box, rang the bell, and followed suit.

I stopped to watch a man trying to feed a clumsy stray puppy some kind of coffee beverage from a bottle. We both had a laugh at this, then the man climbed onto a motorcycle and drove away.

Finally, I found a place that was open. Ginza Renoir. I sat at the low counter where I was offered a hot towel to refresh myself. Using my translation book, I ordered coffee, which came in fine china. I pointed to a picture of some vague sandwich which proved to be egg salad, ham, mayo, cuke, and tomato, on thick white bread with the crusts cut off.

I was given free tea and a separate bill for each of the other two things. ¥440 + ¥490. My book said tipping was frowned upon. Hard not to, but I refrained.

Everywhere I walked there were people cleaning. I stopped at a cigarette machine. Two distinctive Japanese brands stood out, Peace and Hope. I chose Peace, which turned out to be non-filtered and did not come with matches. Putting one in my mouth, I approached a man on the street.

Onegai shimasu, I said, with a flicking action of my finger.

He gave me his own cigarette to get a light off.

Arigato.

Other stores were beginning to open for the day. I ducked into a few to buy souvenirs for folks back home

Bicycles everywhere with metal baskets. Scooters. A gas station with hoses coming down from the roof to save space. Funny, this country was famous for having to conserve space, but so many of the residential streets I walked along were way less crammed than their American counterparts.

I checked out another Buddhist temple.

I watched a guy pull up to vending machine, without getting off his motorcycle he bought a can of coffee then rode off. Looked good to me. I bought what I thought would be a cold coffee beverage, but the can was HOT. There was some kind of heating element inside the vending machine. Weird at first, but I was addicted immediately. I would be buying hot cans of coffee all over Tokyo.

I was starting to get the idea that ¥100 was around a dollar, so sticking a ¥100 coin into a vending machine became less of a crapshoot.

I was getting a little tired. Determined not to look at my map, I noticed some train tracks. Remembering seeing tracks close to the hotel, I kept the tracks in sight and figured I was heading in the right direction.

A woman handed me a pack of tissues with an ad in English on them that said Massage.

“I don’t need a massage,” I told her.

“Keep the tissues,” she said.

Then I thought, wait, I do need a massage.

Years before, I had gotten in a car wreck that occasionally subjected me to almost crippling back pain. On tour this happened so frequently that I had just learned to live with it. But wasn’t Japan the home of Shiatsu?

I walked back to the woman who had given me the free tissue pack.

“What kind of massage?”

“More English upstairs.”

I went upstairs. Not necessarily more English, but I rolled with it anyway.

I’d had a bit of Swedish massage therapy back in the States. This wasn’t that. I’m not sure it was Shiatsu either.

The masseuse was from China and spoke no English, but somehow we communicated anyway. At one point she placed hot towels on my back and a heavy cover that weighed me down like the lead apron at a dentist’s office. Then she walked on me.

It actually worked. Much improved when I hit the street, I found our hotel five minutes later. It turned out the massage place was only three blocks away…

# # #

Strangely, some of my bandmates didn’t seem to like Japan as much as I did. There were a lot of interviews to be done, including a live television appearance. When the TV host asked what we thought about Japan, Jonathan and Grasshopper just looked at me, so I wound up doing much of the talking. I think it might’ve actually been the nightly news, but I’m not sure.

That night we played a venue called the Liquid Room. A uniquely Tokyo setting, on the 7th floor of an 8-story commercial building. This was completely normal here. It held about 600 and was sold out.

The Japanese audience was also very unique. When the music picked up, they all began pogo-ing in absolute unison. Looking out, you saw the crowd moving up-and-down, up-and-down, as if they were a single, coordinated unit. Everyone was smiling.

Afterwards, the label took us to a traditional Japanese restaurant where you took your shoes off and sat on the floor with your legs tucked under the table.

The seating arrangements were interesting. Instead of one big table, they separated the band members, each at our own table with several people from the record label. Whether this was to give us each more attention or a divide-and-conquer technique I had no idea.

I was seated with Shigeki, Noriko, and Kem. Shigeki spoke English with a British accent. He told me stories of how when his grandmother grew up right around here, Shinjuku still had dirt streets.

It is considered bad etiquette to pour your own sake. Noriko kept refilling my little cup continuously rather than allow me to make this mistake. Dinner consisted of many courses. Seaweed, miso, salad, noodles, sushi.

“How do you know how to use chopsticks?” Shigeki asked me. For some reason they were all amazed by this.

“Uh, we have have Japanese restaurants in New York…”

When I offered around the pack of Peace cigarettes after dinner, they found this funny. This was the brand their parents smoked after the war, not so popular with younger people.

Another thing they found funny was that I’d walked around Tokyo looking for Buddhist temples. Shigeki explained to me that many of the practices around here weren’t as much connected with the deeply spiritual as what he called “funeral Buddhism,” making sure people had a place to be buried when they die.

Caron came to the table and whispered for me to excuse myself for a moment. I met her by the bathrooms.

“You need to try the loo in the ladies,” she said.

“I’m not going in the ladies room,” I said. They had such a sense of propriety here, I could only imagine what someone would say if they caught me in the women’s bathroom.

“I’ll stand watch, just do it.”

Against my better judgement, and despite not having to go, I followed her instructions.

“Press all the buttons,” she called through the door, “make sure you press button number three!”

I’d already noticed various innovations in Japanese bathrooms, such as walk-in tubs and toilets that had built-in sinks for hand washing. This toilet had a control panel I’d not seen before. The instructions were in Japanese, but I could figure out numerical order. It soon became apparent that the toilet was also a bidet.

Button one sent a stream of water from behind. Button two sent a stream of water toward the front. I could not imagine where else I was about to get squirted but went ahead and hit button number three, at which point it blasted me with warm air, finishing the job, as it were.

When I emerged from the ladies room, Caron smiled conspiratorially.

Shortly after I returned to the table, the head of the record company announced dinner was over. Everyone else who worked at the label stood up immediately. When they say dinner is over, dinner is over.

The city felt different at night, a colorful maze of lights, gaming, strip shows. Jet lag in Japan is profoundly surreal. It’s not just that you’re off by a few hours. During the day your body insists that it is night, at night your body insists that it is day.

At least on this night as we arrived back at the hotel, my exhaustion was in synch with the local bedtime. I finally got a single night of uninterrupted sleep.

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