Making Peace with Tokyo: Small Wonders in a City of Change

By: Kathryn Ortland

The following first-prize essay was submitted by journalism major Kathryn Ortland as part of an entry for the OIP Photo & Essay Contest. Kathryn studied in the Waseda University program in the 2003-04 academic year.

I woke up Saturday morning to the immense pounding of construction equipment. No matter that I slept with earplugs to block out the noise of motorcyclists revving their engines in the dead of night; every morning at 8:00 sharp I was quite literally shaken awake by the heavy machinery ten feet from my bedroom window.

They were tearing down the ramen shop in front of my house to widen the street. Thus is the direction of progress. Yet, when they broke a new foundation, they blessed the soil in the Shinto tradition and, mercifully, ceased work for several weeks.

Tokyo. A city of longstanding tradition and immense change. A sea of contradictions.

During the time I spent studying abroad at Waseda University, I lived in a small, dusty house on the outskirts of Shinjuku, one of Tokyo’s major metropolitan districts. Many of my classmates lived in suburban or rural areas, with a long commute to our downtown university by train. I took a bus for fifteen minutes, a train for five, and then walked the rest of the way.

In the beginning, I felt privileged to be placed in a comparably urban home-stay, sure that my immersion experience in Shinjuku would quickly shed light on my inexplicable draw to the towering metropolis.

Five weeks in, I hated it. I hated the crush of people, the overwhelming blur of light, and the indecipherable smells. Most of all, I hated the noise. From every street corner, shop girls and competing merchants screamed bargain prices over megaphones. In department stores and restaurants, employees hollered “Welcome!” and “Please give us your business!” to potential patrons. Even the white noise of traffic was punctuated by train crossings and motorcycle engines. Lost in a sea of chaos where I barely spoke the language, I found myself cracking at the edges for want of an uninterrupted train of thought.

I had to find myself in Tokyo or risk going under.

I was in shock and I couldn’t see it. The world around me: signs, shops, cars, and people—all seemed so deceptively normal, so Western. I would fall into an illusive state of comfort, just to have the ground drop out from underneath me when something or someone didn’t proceed in the way I expected. Japan, I thought, was out to get me.

Then one day, toward the end of fall, I found myself stopped in front of a shop, a very Japanese building, which I had passed many times before but never seen. The shop was closed, the windows covered with paper yellowed by the patina of age. Like most Japanese family-run businesses, it was small, set adjacent to the street with no yard or driveway so to speak, and had an upstairs residential quarters.

What struck me about this building first was the way it sort of leaned over onto the much larger concrete structure next door, as if it needed support. In fact, it was penned on both sides by newer, bigger, better buildings, and with just a few plastered-over earthquake cracks.

There seemed to be nothing so extraordinary about this shop that it should have entranced me so, until I realized that it was made entirely out of wood. It was a “survivor” of the extensive Tokyo fire bombings in World War II. Wooden buildings, except in parts of the Shitamachi (lower city), are a rare find. But here, nestled among everyday businesses, was this remnant, still standing as if forgotten.

From that day, I stopped more and more, often with camera in hand, to stare in wonder at some lovely little contradiction I’d found. Many times I confused passers-by by gawking into traffic mirrors placed at complicated intersections. I was captivated by the reflection of everyday life, past and present.

Tokyo is growing, expanding while it changes, forgetting while it remembers. There are tens of thousands of tiny Shinto temples and Buddhist shrines sprinkled throughout the back streets, some as new as the city sprawl and others patronized by the same families for generations.

And so, with some chagrin, I learned to put up with the construction outside my window. It is, after all, the law of returns in the city. Instead of spending late Saturday mornings in bed with a pillow over my face, I got up and got on the train. Despite the efficient public transportation options of the Tokyo trains, subways and busses, I walked many more miles during the ten months I spent in Japan than I ever have or probably ever will.

I took my camera around the main city circuit to Shibuya, Harajuku, Ginza, Tokyo, Takadanobaba, Shinbashi, Akihabara and more. I poked around back alleys, into temples—and once I got started, I couldn’t get enough.

More than anything, I got to know Shinjuku. The crazy business, shopping and pleasure district that is the setting for Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation was also my playground and my backyard. At first I could only spend an hour or so out in the city before becoming overwhelmed by it all. I felt faint, I had migraines, I sweated profusely.

But as time passed and the months rolled by, I spent more of my days and nights wandering the streets of Shinjuku than I had the streets at home.

My host family was appreciative, almost overly so, of the time I spend touring their city. They saw it as no small feat when I walked somewhere rather than taking the train, or bought anything from a sweater to a commuter pass by myself. Whenever I showed them my photographs, they ooh’ed and aah’ed, though what impressed them wasn’t the content itself but that I found so much interest in things they took for granted.

The more time passed, the more I wanted to see. Instead of becoming gradually more ordinary, my life in Tokyo seemed more extraordinary each day. Every meal was an experience; every bus ride, a journey. Long before I returned to America, I knew that I had found the wonder needed to transform everyday life into something beautiful and unique.

Japanese prayer cards, called ema, bear messages of goodwill in many languages.

Fresh ume (small, tart plums) drying in baskets after having soaked in the Japanese countryside. Ume are pickled and eaten with many traditional Japanese dishes.