City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Lindsay Lueders
Location: the Inokashira line, car 4, Kichijoji station

She was hopelessly sexy. It was undeniable; her allure was dripping from her sleeping body in teaspoons and unfolding into the night. Her legs, decorated in delicate black fishnets, were sliding further apart with every jerk of the locomotive. Her tumbling black head of locks rocked sweetly, bobbing and dangling on a limp, unconscious neck. In other cities of the world, I would have feared for her purity. 

But the gentlemen around her took a tangible pleasure not in gawking but in overseeing her safe transport home. If one of them had been holding a blanket, he would have wrapped her securely in it. They were watching over her in wordless, self-supervised agreement. 

When we arrived at Kichijoji, she remained oblivious in her seat. Dewy eyes closed, her porcelain arms and legs splayed attractively. Even her handbag was wide open, cosmetics and glosses nearly spilling out into our faces. 

Who would be the lucky man to alert her to the fact that we had reached the end of the line? This task, too, was approached with solemn modesty; too eager a volunteer would have appeared incongruently lewd. One young man appointed himself, stood and touched her shoulder, brimming with what could only have been honor. She rose in a deer-like wobble and her skirt fell back to its rightful length. The straps of her sling backs were squashed under her bare heels but I knew that she’d traipse into the dark evening safe from perversion, under the watchful eye of a careful and trustworthy society. 

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Edamame
Location: a kaiten sushi shop (now gone)

We watched as the trained sushi chefs silently and expertly added more plates onto the conveyor belt. It was late afternoon and there were maybe five other customers who sat perched on their stools in cramped quarters. Our gaze was focused on the freshest catch to satisfy our appetites.

A plate of ika^[1] nigiri sushi went round and round, waiting for someone to claim it and save it from yet another 360-degree turn on the belt. The ika had made too many turns. It was not attracting any one of us as we conspiratorially and collectively ignored its existence. One of the sushi chefs sprayed it with some water to give it a glistening exterior, just as a woman would put on fresh make-up to attract a suitor.

I remarked to my companion, “wouldn’t it be sad to become a dry piece of squid on the kaiten sushi of life?  That’s a fate one wants to avoid.” We laughed about it as we began making a conscious effort to avoid it while counting every turn it made.  Four, five, six…it went round and round, to a point where you wanted to ask the itamae-san^[2] to please put it out of its misery.

Years later, the shop went out of business.  And I too found myself discarded like some unwanted fish. 

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Hakanai
Location: a karaoke box near the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station

Loveless in the karaoke box, I watched lyrics roll across a TV screen in time to unsung songs. A tongue was moving around my big toe, like a warm slug crawling. 

The owner of the tongue lifted his mouth from my foot for a moment and held the foot in his hand. He paused, and I looked at him, thinking that he might be going to speak, but the pause was not a long one. No sooner had he left my big toe than he started on the next one, with the same concentration.

I’d met him an hour before at Hachiko^[1], the dog statue at Shibuya crossing. Hachiko’s story reminded me of another dog in another town, a different dog with the same story. All over the world, people were building monuments to obsessive compulsive canines. Philandering humans were fascinated by these exemplars of fidelity. 

“By the way, did I mention that I’m married?” he said, looking up from my middle toe. 

“No, but your advert was about feet, wasn’t it? Not long-term relationships.”

As he moved onto the next toe, I wondered how he decided the length of time to spend on each one. Or was it that once he had explored a particular toe he got bored and needed to find another. And what would happen after the tenth toe? Would he return to the first? Or would he travel further to the sole and heel of my foot? If he returned to the first toe and took as long there, I might have to spend all day in this karaoke box. 

He looked up again.

“There have been lots of famous foot fetishists, you know. Baudelaire was one, Goethe was one.”

“Goethe?”

“Yeah. People have tried to play down his erotic side, but it’s there in his writing.”

“Have you read the Sorrows of Young Werther?”

“Of course.”

“I think of it all the time when I see Lotte^[2] products.”

“That company’s named after her, you know.”

“What about Lotteria^[3]?”

“Same company,” he said, “Poor Goethe. His great unrequited love has been reduced to a fast food chain.” He reflected for a moment, then returned to my toes.

Later, outside the karaoke building, we said goodbye and that we’d meet again and then we parted. 

And I lost myself in the crowds wondering about it all. 

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Daniel Snyder
Location: an unnamed anime and games shop

August, rapacious. Akihabara ^[1] wears the heat like a suit lined with pointed daggers. The people scowl, hurting too much to hurry across the avenues. The buildings have ruptured: stores spill forth their wares like overripe fruit. Customers flit in and out, thirsting for the wet air conditioning.

She’s sitting in front of a store, in the twilit zone between scarring heat and sluggish cold, at a fold-out table. She could be 18 or 29.  Her face is beautiful, fit for recycling after one use. And she’s wearing a costume. A maid, or a princess, or some role that involves white lace and a black frock. She does not sweat, she doesn’t even slouch in her seat.

Behind her is a banner with a very different picture. It’s the picture of a woman with great dishplate eyes and long blonde plastic hair in a complicated braid. That woman is not dainty, she is dressed plate armor of European design. That portrait is flanked by kanji more like Rorschach blots than any written language. There is no passing resemblance between the two women. But many interchangeable heroines can be seen in the store, and up and down the block.

Ten minutes pass.

In that time, one scrawny boy has visited the table. The two shook hands politely, limply, as Japanese do. They spoke. She smiled a plasticine smile. He went away. Her posture is as fixed as it has ever been.

A half hour more will pass before she has another visitor.

There will come a time—when the sponsor pulls out, or later tonight when she’s alone in her tiny apartment, or yet today as this abominable heat rakes its claws against the anarchic cool —that the facade will crack, then splinter. Ichor will gush out of this carefully constructed image. And the drying human remains left behind, what will become of them? Will they try and pull back inside their shell? Will they beg for the attention this lifestyle didn’t grant them? Will they lie fetal, scared beyond any recovery, and mew out in blind horror at their fate?

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Jason Gray
Location: the 7-11 at the intersection of Mejiro-dori and Senkawa-dori

Light turns green, I roll across the intersection. Walking along the sidewalk in front of me, a fashionable young woman. Burgundy crushed velvet skirt over other layers, black leather boots, vintage coat, long straight black hair. Goth-ish. Can’t see her face.

Walking with purpose. Confident strides, but not exactly in a hurry. Forget ogling. She’s on some kind of mission. Not going into that 7-11, like I am. 

I glance at her face as I roll in front of her. Her eyes and skin are slightly reddened. Her lip ring twitches. Distant eyes. Drugs?

I park my bicyclette at the combini.^[1] Another glance. She tugs at something on her wrist. Is she trying to yank a thread from the pouch in her hand? Is the thread imaginary? Her face twitches again. That jerky hand motion…

She passes behind me. I turn to watch her walk away. She’s not pulling. 

She’s cutting. Slashing. 

One of those cheap pink plastic-handled straight razors that Japanese women use to shave their armpits. At least twenty gashes down the pale underside of her left forearm. Some are like cat scratches, others are deep slits. Blood oozes. 

Suddenly the blade is the only focused object in my field of vision. It sniks across her wrist again. I wince, more than her.

She walks and slashes. People go in and out of the combini, cross crosswalks. She beelines straight through. Nobody notices her, she notices nobody.

I look around for the omawari-san.^[2] At night there’s usually at least one rookie on their mountain bike stationed at the big junction. Not tonight.

I watch her continue down the sidewalk, alone, small. Her right arm jerks with each slice as big transport trucks rumble past. 

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Selena Hoy
Location: the arch in HaraMachida

It’s a brisk winter evening. Coming out of Japanese class, we crossed the plaza beneath the tall silver arch that stretches from the keitai^[1] shop to the dilapidated tiled alcove containing a Doutor^[2], a boba-tea shop^[3], and a small, bright toy-train jungle gym usually surrounded by a smattering of grandparents resting with their shopping, while their young charges cavort on the astro-turf. More lonely a place than before, now that the Tokyu Hands^[4] has closed up shop and moved down the road. We happened on two pubescent boys in middle school uniforms with navy blue short-pants sharing a tentative, tender kiss. One was touching the other’s hair at the side of his face, just barely. Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten.

PDA is fairly non-existent in Japan: the most you usually get is some hetero hand-holding - and then only with young couples. And regular gayness isn’t seen much, even in ultra-modern Tokyo. Though you’re likely to see a flaming transvestite if you wander Shinjuku’s Kabuki-cho^[5], the sighting of non-theatrical same-sex public affection is extremely rare.

Add this to the fact that our little outpost of Machida^[6] isn’t exactly the center of hipster Tokyo, and that the lovers were probably pre-teen.

I don’t know those young boys, but I know that adolescent love and desire is hard enough to reckon with when you’re straight. With all the other factors compounding the difficulty, we felt as though we had stumbled across something special happening.

Hang tough, young men.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Reuben Stanton
Location: a jazz bar in Kichijoji

We found the place by accident. Trying bars at random.

She must have been in her eary 20s. She was not classically pretty. She had a sadness, a kindness, a melancholy. She placed small plates of olives and crackers in front of us at the old man’s behest and I knew we were being charged just to sit down. She took her place at the other end of the bar next to the only other customer, a youngish, tired looking salaryman with his own whisky bottle and a half-empty glass. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The old man said something, too quiet for us to hear, and she smiled softly in return.

What is it like to be the daughter (I’m guessing, the daughter) of an old Japanese man? To be the daughter (yes, definitely his daughter) of the owner of a small jazz bar in Kichijoji?^[1]

He seemed kind. The bar had a large cabinet filled with bottles of Suntory and Canadian Club, with tags and names handwritten in kanji. Many regulars, I guess, or many people who splurged one night and never came back. The amplifier on the stereo was one of those vintage valve affairs, and was featured on a poster near the doorway.

How many nights had she sat there, amongst the bottles and the obscure records and the crimson velvet walls? I desperately wanted to talk to her, but my Japanese was limited to “biiru futatsu kudasai”^[2] and “eki wa dochira desu ka”^[3] – hardly engrossing conversation. I tried to listen to what my friend was saying, tried to look away, while my wandering, drunken mind created its own history.

Her mother had died young, unexpectedly, tragically. She had travelled with her father to New York and Chicago to see where the real jazz was played.^[4] But his dreams of being a professional musician had been too difficult to follow with his daughter in tow, and he had returned to Tokyo and opened this bar. He hadn’t wanted to return, and she knew this. That was years ago. Recently she had begun making excuses to help him out at the bar, but the real reason she came was that still, more than anything, she loved to watch him play.

He turned away, switched off the stereo, and collected the double bass that leant against the back wall. He stood poised, his eyes closed tight, his right hand index finger floating and ready to fall on the thick E string, warm and golden in the light.

As he played, she would close her eyes and gently sway to the music. Occasionally, when he played a certain phrase, a certain riff, she would smile, slowly, knowingly, as if the riff contained a personal joke, a message just for her.

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Darryl Wee
Location: a slope in Hiroo

Nostalgia is a different color, and camera angle, each time you try to revisit it. This is a problem if, like me, you try very hard to be proprietary about it and keep scrupulous tabs on your memories. Tracking down your own past is a treacherous task, though. Things never quite look the same as your memory each time you try to track it down in ‘real’ life.

Coming back to Tokyo nineteen years after I spent a year here as a seven year-old, I tried to retrace the old hill route near where I used to live. A gentle slope near Hiroo Station, past the park strewn with fallen pinecones opposite the Red Cross building, to and from the Jewish Center where the school bus would pick me up. The problem was, my approach was wrong. My playback memory unfurls uphill, from Hiroo station past Hiroo Garden Hills. Nineteen years later, I decide to come from the other direction, from Ebisu station, downhill towards Hiroo. I walked in a daze past shopping streets I forgot I remembered. 

It’s a different film. Or rather, just an unfaithful remake by a different director taking too many liberties with the screenplay.

Also, I’m not nearly as small as I used to be, so instead of an Ozu-type^[2] waist-high tatami^[3] view, I now have a view that’s too high by half, too much overhead vision. Also, the beautiful sugi ^[4] lining the slope on the way to my house, just like me, have grown up. They now form a canopy that interferes with the lighting. 

There were other problems with the light on that slope. 80’s-memories, like the films from that era, are saturated with color. It must be something to do with the film stock. That day, though, Hiroo looked too subdued; the summer’s woolly light, bleached and overcast, failed to replicate my ‘nostalgia’. What I needed was a better location scout sensitive to the nuances of season, aspect, walking speed, and angle of approach. I felt frustrated with myself. With a professional studio shoot I would have been able to control these things, edit sounds, tweak the lighting, and then later in post-production, colorize or decolorize the film stock as necessary.

But I had only a fading film negative in my head, poorly resolved, made on the clunky technology of the eighties. Better to borrow your nostalgia from the professionals, I thought. Is there a better common-use archive than film? It’s well-curated, organized, and endlessly replayable, to recolor our own blotchy memories with. Nostalgia isn’t an easy indulgence for amateurs with little technical skill. Maybe its source image should be locked into a time capsule and stowed away, with no intention of a later rediscovery. See it only once, roll it over again in your head now and then, but make sure that repeat viewings don’t cloud that first, enchanted screening. 

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Rick Kennedy
Location: a pastry shop in Shibuya

I was looking for canvases, having taken up oil painting. I knew I could buy some at an enormous art store in Shinjuku, but here I was in Shibuya, wandering around, and I saw this store called “Palette” which looked as though it had some painting equipment in the window. So I knocked on the door; maybe they’d have some.

“Excuse me, I’d like to buy some canvases,” I said.

“Canvases? What are canvases?” said a long, lanky young man.

“Ah, I don’t know the Japanese for canvases. That’s the English word. They are used to paint pictures on.” And I pantomimed painting a picture.

“Hmm. Oh, you mean kanbasu. For oil painting.” He pronounced the word a little different than I did, in a Japanese way.

“Well yes. I thought I could buy some from you.”

“Ah, we don’t have any…but please come in. I will make some telephone calls. I know some places in Shibuya which might have canvases.”

I thanked him and went inside the shop, which upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a pastry shop, not an art-supply shop at all. The name of the shop, Palette, was a metaphor.

After five minutes, the young man came to me to apologize. He could discover no place in Shibuya which sells canvases. I would have to go to Seikaido^[1] in Shinjuku, 10 minutes away on the Yamanote line, instead.

“I am so very sorry,” the man said, “but anyway please take one of these little cheese cakes …”^[2]

City: Tokyo, Japan
Author: Aneta Glinkowska
Location: Ueno Park

My Ueno memories revolve around the homeless living in the park. In particular, believe it or not, the grooming habits of the homeless. The Ueno homeless, in their homely blue tents with shoes neatly lined up at their entrances, remind me of the character from Imamura’s “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.”^[1] The eccentric character supports his blue tent with stacks of books he’s read. I also think of the group of homeless gourmets from the ramen western “Tampopo.”^[2] These are homeless who can fix you a perfect omuraisu^[3], hand you the best ramen recipe or direct you to a ramen shop which would get a Michelin Guide star, if there was a category for it.

Once, walking through Ueno to the National Museum, as I was about to enter the museum grounds, I spotted to my left two lines of men, 10 or 15 in all, waiting for something. There were a few blue crates and coolers standing around, as though the group was on a picnic. I realized that the men, quite neatly dressed, were the inhabitants of the blue, makeshift tents in the bushes. They were lined up for a free haircut given by two young women. The idea of a haircutting service for the homeless struck me as unique and, if nothing else, yet another
rare quirk of Tokyo.

A year later, I invited Eugene, a classmate from my Japanese lessons to Ueno Park. As we walked through the park, I told Eugene about the homeless men lined up for haircuts the year before. Mid-story, looking up, I was surprised to find men once again in line at the very same spot. But this time, instead of the bizarre sight of young women cutting hair, the homeless were waiting for their turn with older, male barbers dressed in white uniforms with red crosses on them. Strangely, there was something appropriate about these old men cutting the hair of the homeless.

If you ask an average Tokyo dweller—long or short term—about Ueno Park they will likely tell you of its many cultural institutions or advise you to visit it for exotic street performers, or perhaps a stroll during the hanami season. As much as I enjoy those myself, I’ll tell you, I saw a dozen men getting their haircuts in the middle of the park two years in a row and I keep going back for more of the surreal.