By Shih Hwa Du
Torishige is a famous yakitori-eating establishment. You must telephone and book a reservation and you are allowed only one hour. It is tiny and cramped inside, with barely enough room for the 8 customers who sit around the L-shaped counter, as the hostess grills her delicious chicken shish kebab morsels in a corner on her pan. Everyone waits patiently, she has a short temper. There are no complaints. None would be tolerated anyway. The sake is heated in a battered old aluminum teapot. I ask her for permission to photograph her and she blushes with embarrassment. After a volley of dishes in the span of an hour, I leave to make room for the next customers anxiously waiting in line outside in the 8-degree chill. She is booked solid every evening. This moment, this place, recalls so much that has been lost; the scale, the closeness to other bodies, the moment when people fuse together as spirits in one place; the shabbiness of it, the barracks-like aspect. It is hard to find this today in the stainless steel and glass international city the post war Japanese have manufactured. I prefered the Tsukiji market to the great new Tokyo-Edo Museum; it seems so much more vital and earthy and alive by comparison. The Tsukiji Central Wholesale Market supplies ninety percent of Tokyo’s fish and is the place to catch the flavor and energy of Tokyo without the ornate wrappings. It stands beside the Sumida River in a huge ramshackle factory building. Everywhere, there are rows (and rows…and rows) of fish fresh from the Pacific, from Indonesia, and from Mexico. Monster-long 150 pound tunas, crimson octopus, disfigured sea slugs and the pervasive stench…. it’s a de facto seafood museum! Men in bloody aprons with trimming knives hack at the tuna (surprisingly, all Japanese civility is forgotten). Small petrol-driven carts careen between the rows of stalls. It is Tokyo chaos in miniature. Outside, a snowy Mount Fuji is built from the Styrofoam trays the fish arrived in. In an effort to encapsulate the past, they recently opened the Tokyo-Edo Museum on the opposite bank of the Sumida River. It resembles a huge metal dog on four steel legs. Inside the body, 20m up in the air, full-sized buildings show what 19th Century Edo looked like. Access is by way of an escalator in a transparent glass tongue. There are a few tiny corners still left in Tokyo where you can catch a glimpse of the real old Edo-Tokyo. East of the great Kannon Temple in Asakusa, I stumble across a decrepit, small, wooden corner cabin with an entrance on one side and a garden on the other. It is occupied by an old woman who has turned it into a combined residence-restaurant. Her washing machine, clothesline, and garden of potted plants are placed outside on the pathway. She insists I come in and eat (lucky for me her prices are reasonable). In the notorious Piss Alley, near Shinjuku, the street narrows to not much more than 4 meters across and is lined on both sides by rows of tiny timber-framed shops. Red paper lanterns glow in the darkness. In the still corners, blue-silver eyes shine in the corners. Suddenly, as though charged by batteries, these houseflies buzz in my direction; it is only when they are within swatting distance that I realize they are men in dark suits, with oil-slicked hair, wearing eighties sunglasses. Presumably the yakuza (gansters)- as I’m later told. Unfortunately, down these ancient alleyways, the evils of capitalism run rampant; women in fishnet stockings and tiaras pout their lips enticingly. Tokyo is now ranked to be the most expensive city in the world. Needless to say, nothing in this city is for free. Free fun is only found in the eye of the beholder (beauty is no stranger to this concept either). People-watching is at its best in this city. Inhabited by 12 million people, its no wonder that fashion is a BIG thing here. This year’s look varies between the two extremes- ‘kogarus’ (young women in outrageous platforms, bleached hair, and mud-like complexions) and 'amazones’ (women in sexy black transparent clothing with an attitude that says “I’m sexy, strong and independent, so get out of my way!’). Fashion culture in Japan is all about women. Go to any department store, any trendy cafe or restaurant and you can be sure that 95% of the clientele is female. It is a city of the chic, where Louis Vuitton bags outnumber shopping bags, and 3-inch Gucci heels make music. The guys are hard to notice and you’re never sure if they’re really alive or not. If they are, they’re merely there to pick up the tab or to fill in space. If you’re going to watch the people scene, don’t bother showing up until around eight in the evening. Any earlier and the scene is just of the geeks and 9-5ers. Young people, true to their creed, hate getting up early. I really recommend Kosyu-kaido Ave in the Shinjuku area and the backstreets of the Roppongi subway station- the scene is truly colorful. Visiting Tokyo, it is impossible to get any idea of the city in its entirety. You see only bits of it at any one time; it is a collection of intense, colorful fragments. Most visitors assemble their picture of Tokyo from these fragmentary impressions. There is just too much of it, with little of it is related to anything else; so observers come away with just their collection of favorite fragments. This assumes that Tokyo is a whole, or just the common stereotypes, but the very opposite is true. Tokyo lacks integration; perhaps the only way to grasp the city is from above, from the Tokyo Tower. This is a brightly painted orange copy of the Eiffel Tower, only higher. From the 333 feet observatory, the city extends as far as the eye can see. All I can see are the rooftops and a running network of aerial expressways crisscrossing like disorderly strands of spaghetti and occasionally interweaving with the elevated railway lines. Over the Sumida’s mouth, the pale blue Rainbow Bridge hangs delicately- Tokyo has its own Golden Gate (surprising isn’t it?). Fumihiko Maki, professor of architecture at Tokyo University, and recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for 1993 explains Tokyo thus: “Visually, Tokyo might not be very civilized, but it does possess a certain social civility.” Edward Seidensticker, a historian and prominent translator of Japanese literature said, “Everything is subsumed onto Tokyo and Tokyo is subsumed unto everything; and the nation marches victoriously on.”- Not completely true, just at a jogger’s pace. #Volume 6 Issue 3 a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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