I lived in Tokyo between 1999 and 2001. It was during my early twenties, so in many ways it was a pivotal experience, a coming of age. I’ve been back a few times since – for a few weeks at a time for work, and then in 2009(?) a three month spell for research. Most recently was this December, when I spent a couple of weeks there in the run up to Christmas.
When I lived there, I was in the south, in the 23 Ku that form the main body of the city but still a little off the beaten track. When I went for work, I stayed in hotels in the very middle but they were very short trips and I was too busy to do much in the way of revisiting; then in 2009 I was in the far north and never found time to get all the way across town. Only this most recent visit brought me back to the southern half. To be sure, it was closer to the middle, and a more fashionable part of town than where I lived the first time around, but still it really felt like the first time I’d been back to the Tokyo I knew, or perhaps knew up to a point.
There has been a lot of development in the intervening years, and a lot has changed. Back in 2000, there was an urban atlas that was more or less mandatory for finding your way around Tokyo’s winding streets and strange block/building numbering; gradually new buildings and new train lines rendered it increasingly unreliable. Now of course we have google maps, which is a relief. I think I’m right that the street pattern is largely unchanged, but increasingly large building developments and underground networks are a significant part of the city’s geography. Shibuya station, the hub around which much of my daily life revolved back when I first came, is now unrecognizable, and I got thoroughly lost more than once in the underground precinct around Tokyo station (although more than one Tokyo native reassured me that this was totally normal). So although it felt good to revisit the part of town where I used to live, it was also a reminder that everything changes.
One of the ways in which Tokyo has changed, especially these developments around the major stations, is that a lot of it feels much more, well, chic, than I remember. Tokyoites are quite a dressy people; walking about the new buildings, seeing these well-dressed people going about their lives with 21st century concerns and interests, I did wonder why I had flown half way around the world to research the 1920s of a society that doesn’t seem to have much need of its past. I visited a library collection in Tokyo University that felt like stepping back into the period I was researching – alone, huddled next to an oil heater reading newspapers from 100 years ago in an otherwise empty building I felt a world away from the people out there with their miniature dogs and magazines listing the latest cafes. But then I went to the national archives and discovered a huge sprawling building full of people beavering away at their research. I wasn’t the only person still interested in Japan’s past.
Then one weekend day I decided to take a brief trip to some old haunts. I wandered around an old temple I used to like, and then up past a lake that I used to jog around. My memory of the street plan was a bit hazy, but I decided to make one last stop. There was a noodle shop I used to go to probably two, three times a week on average — so often that I got friendly with the son of the proprietor. He used to make deliveries on a scooter, whilst his mum ran the front of house and his dad did the cooking. As I got closer to it, I started to worry – amidst all this change, with some parts of Tokyo unrecognizable and the upmarket drift to most of the building, would this small restaurant, that was homely but shabby nearly 20 years, ago still be there? I’d tried to check it out on google maps a while before, but either they hadn’t passed directly past it, or I couldn’t find the exact street. Was this going to be a heartbreaking disappointment?
I turned the corner, and at least it was still there, and indeed open. So I ducked under the curtain and inside. I needn’t have worried, it was exactly the same as it had been. I sat in the same chair I used to and gave my order to the woman, who showed no sign of recognizing me. Her son was nowhere to be seen, so after a little while, I asked her – ‘do you remember me from a few years ago?’ I’m not sure if she did or not, but she called back into the depths of the shop and her son came out; he certainly did and we chatted for a while about this and that, as if nothing had changed – I was a bit(…) fatter, he had a little bit of grey in his hair but he still ran the deliveries while his father cooked and his mother waited the tables.
Fireflies 