This was entirely true. It felt like we were walking in the midst of a floating world, where trivial things like time and cost have no relative bearing. Where jokes and good times go down like shots of whiskey, which burn bright and warm in the otherwise sharp and cutting cold. Where everything takes on a fond, amber glow, and yesterday and tomorrow seem so far away that they almost will never matter any more.
We had taken a mid-morning train into Southern Tokyo. One of our teacher friends at 市立柏 was performing at a recital in Kachidoki (勝ちどき), an upscale area swathed in new money. So, dressed to the nines (or, in our case, 6 or 7 out of 9) we made a day of it, as we drifted from one swanky scene to the next, finding our way through romantic happenstance to Nishinaka Street in the Tsukishima (月島) district, another landfill project dredged from the depths of Tokyo Bay, famous for its surfeit of monjayaki (もんじゃ焼き) and okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) shops.
Eventually we ambled our way to the upscale areas of 六本木, Mid-Town and Roppongi Hills, to take in their Christmas "Illuminations" and rub elbows with the rest of Tokyo's young and affluent.
It has actually been a while since I've been on any trips of any length. Not even these kinds of short, one-day excursions that literally defined every weekend of my first year in Japan. That isn’t to say that I haven’t been traveling. A few weeks ago I boarded the bus for my first trip to Chiba City. Granted, that bus was the school bus and the trip was pretty much a business/field-trip to chaperone students to their 県大会. But now I can say that I've been there twice!
"I do miss this sort of adventuring," I remarked. Yet I really do love the things that I have been doing with 部活動 and, unfortunately, that means that I have to choose. But when I find myself at school every single day of the week, it's easy to see how small my world can seem to become sometimes.
And yet small doesn’t necessarily mean bad. It just means that I have to be much more intentional about exploring the places that I find myself in. In remembering to stop and try that quiet looking soba shop I pass by on my way from the bus stop before I walk into the bento shop on my way home. In planning to arrive an extra forty minutes earlier to walk through that small shrine I always see on the bus ride to school. It’s the same here as it is everywhere: I have to be intentional about setting aside time for myself to explore the more interior spaces of places and ideas.
I love traveling. In fact, I'd put traveling on my short list of "greatest things I can do with my free time," right along side of coming across a killer "shuffled" playlist on iTunes, knocking out rounds of the "Weekend Dungeon" in Puzzles and Dragons, and avoiding those putrescent puke-piles Tokyo-ites call "もんじゃ焼き".
It's just now I'm doing a different kind of traveling. I've been pouring myself into a different kind of tourism. The intimate, daily grind of 部活 and 武道 has become an essential part of my own daily grind and is an invaluable aspect of my personal experience of cultural exchange. But it needs be remembered that tourism has it's value, that the material aspect helps root and tether the abstract and etherial.
It's odd to think that the floating ephemera of Tsukishima and Roppongi Hills can tie or bind anything other than one's credit score, but the tangible and historical helps remind me that every narrative exists in a gritty, complex network, the kind of multifariousness that systems-of-thought and critical theory can oftentimes gloss over or white-wash for the sake of harmony and coherence. Even in Japan. Especially in Japan.
So, for now, I will revel in Matthew's experiences; a conduit through which I can renew my own experiences of unfamiliar tangible forms of Japan.
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