12 Years in Tokyo

Yep, I'm still a bit stunned—today is my twelfth anniversary of living in this country, so I've been away from Melbourne (my old stomping ground-cum-home town) for well over a decade now.

The plan was originally six months.

When I arrived on July 26th, 2001 the world was, cliché as it might sound, a different place.

It was the year Stanley Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was supposed to take place, but didn't.

That July the World Trade Center attack in New York was still over six weeks away, Junichiro Koizumi had just become prime minister of this country while George W. Bush had been kicking back in office in the U.S. for seven months. John Howard (shudder) had run Australia into the ground for six years already.

Wikipedia had been online for just six months, the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films were released and Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed Amélie. In 2001 Japanese cinema was also on a roll: the great Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) delivered up live-action deep-thinker Avalon, while anime-wise we were blessed with two brilliant films by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) and Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress).

Personally? I was still running my record label IF? and doing odd tracks as Little Nobody, but became more focused on local food, saké, travel and journalism. I found myself living in Shin-Koiwa here in Tokyo, in a place called "Hikari Mansion"—named, perhaps with perverted jocularity, in line with
the Japanese concept of a ‘mansion’: myriad apartments thrown together in the single building, with each separate flat containing one or two tiny rooms and a more compact bathroom. 

I worked for the rather evil Nova franchise teaching English to pay the bigger bills, and did articles on the side for The Daily Yomiuri, an English language off-shoot of right-leaning Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.

Twelve years later I'm married and I have a gorgeous daughter in Grade 2 at elementary school—who recently did the bloody brilliant cover art for my latest book.

Some things have stayed the same, like the sticky late-July humidity that assails Tokyo every year, like now, but I'm today not going to whine. It is, after all, part of the charm of the place.

Throw Away Tokyo Pt. 2

As a bit of an addendum to the last entry in this rambling blog thingy, I'm actually pursuing a strain of thought instead of the usual mad intent on erraticism. (is that even a real word? If not, it should be.)

I can't really take credit, however, for sticking to the theme - that belongs to my mate Lee, a fellow expat (from Canada) living here in Tokyo. He saw my rant on the postmodern buildings and responded in kind.

"Did you ever see this poor old building in Ueno? It was demolished about two years ago. It was barely 10 years old," he said in an e-mail I got the other day via Facebook.

"I'll tell you a short story," he continued in follow-up repartee.

"When I first came to Japan I lived with a friend of mine in eastern Saitama for a month before I started working at Nova. From her place I would take the Joban Line to get into Tokyo, and at a certain point on the line between Minami-Senju and Mikawashima stations I could just barely make out the top of that building for fractions of a second through the cracks in other buildings as the train went along.

"After several trips, I was able to see enough of the building to realize it actually had a crazy triangle shape on the top. I became captivated with it and would always look for it as I took the train, trying to figure out what this weird building was, but at the time I was not familiar with the layout of Tokyo and had no clue where it was or how to find it. For me at the time, it was just one of those weird mysteries that made Tokyo more interesting.

"Now it's gone."