Yokohama on My Mind

The Japan I know of is silent in its politeness. The harbor city of Yokohama is as modern as neighboring Tokyo and yet it retains a restrained charm, like a geisha, beautiful in its many facets.

The shinkansen (bullet train) reverbates through my fifth floor room, an intrusion that unfailingly wakes me up each day to a languid sense of discipline. I rise at half past seven, open the window and let the frigid morning air in, dewy and lush with beginnings. I tie-up the green butterfly-filled curtains and watch this clear-eyed city of middle-rise residential buildings and quaint, pointed Japanese roofs yawn to life. I check the television for the weather before leaving. Yokohama is a temperamental brat in autumn, flippant and unpredictable. Most days are cold and dry, but one needs to watch out for those blasted rainy days with amazingly strong winds.

***
I walk the three minute walk to the train station, savoring the sweet taste of unspoiled air in the city. I pass that beautiful black house , its elegant peach trees surrounded by one liter PET bottles filled with water which is the owner’s ingenious way of marking his property. My street is filled with tiny shops inserted along residential buildings. A neighborhood salon with a dreadlocked lad for its logo, small pubs that pop out of nowhere, and the ubiquitous twenty four hour Pachinko (slot machine) centers.

It is Tuesday, Namamugi’s garbage day, and so along the designated pick-up points in street corners are bulky transparent plastic bags awaiting the morning rounds of the city truck. I pass by the neighborhood Super grocery store where shop workers are busily arranging the fresh produce for display. They stop once in a while to utter a polite Ohaiyo Gozaimazu. I nod back with a smile and walk slowly towards the station entrance, using the stairs to the train instead of the escalator. I have five minutes to spare before the local train arrives. This is a routine I will probably miss someday, the punctuality that seems to pervade in this country. The synchronized time, the big public clocks accurate to the minute. I look around, lazily watching people as I stand at my usual waiting place, near a vendo machine selling Kirin drinks. And as always, an express train buzzes through the station in time, blowing with it a rapid gust of cold gale. A minute more and my train arrives. I enter and sit among those who must have learned to take their country’s efficient system for granted.

***
And yet there are days when I want to slack off. To work in a little less harried pace. But then that constant fervent kind of energy in the workroom buoys me over. That drive and work ethic that the Japanese people are infamous for. How when I look around and watch the disciplined work practice, the managers working as assiduously as the young staff engineers, I cannot help but be challenged to be as meticulous with work as they are. Eventually, like fish to water we learn to adapt to the practice of long work hours punctuated by a sprinkling of five-minute coffee breaks.

***
I go home at half past seven each day, often tired and hungry. For the most part I cook and brownbag my lunch and eat dinner at home. But on days such as this when the hunger becomes unbearable, it is always a choice between gyudon (rice toppings with thinly sliced marinated beef in a secret soyu based sauce topped with pickled ginger and spices) at a nearby Matsuya which is the less popular yet more delicious and cheaper alternative to Yoshinoya or tendon (rice toppings with assorted tempura of shrimp, fish and seasonal vegetables drenched in a sweetish tempura sauce) at Tenya Express. I love them both, Matsuya and Tenya, two fastfood outlets scattered all over Japan offering filling and inexpensive meals for the working class.


After supper, I browse around the Book-off store to check for new stocks of used and inexpensive music CDs. Or buy myself a matcha (green tea) ice cream at a Hyaku yen (100 yen) shop near the office to cleanse the palate and to let the thermodynamics of cold melting against cool air in my mouth on a windy autumn night.

***
I walk towards home, the train trailing my thoughts. And marvel at the Japan I am living in. The little stunted trees heavy with the yellow ripeness of peaches, my quiet Yokohama suburb, this simple yet good enough life. How this is so unlike the fast and frenzied Japan I imagined. How these bits of ordinariness come together --- fragile trees, dying leaves, gyudon, tendon, tiny apartments and trains. And me, the gaijin girl looking in.

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These are a mish-mash of entries I made while working in Japan in 2002 and 2004.