The city

I was literally lost in Tokyo, an alien on another planet observing people different from me. Women that look like dolls – women in Japan are of course tiny and extremely sweet and beautiful, they care very much about how they look like, so I was surprised (besides walking in the street and see extremely sweet dressed young ladies-even prostitutes were lovely) to see at midnight, at the subway, tens of young ladies with perfect make-up on their faces, with perfect hair style, lovely shoes, great kimonos and fresh looks. What I found though strange was that many buy shoes that are 1-2 sizes bigger than their actual size – my first thought was that they would do that because they have tiny feet, nooooo…..they do it because they are afraid that the shoes might be to tight for them and hurt them in time…I guess they never thought that shoes can be also uncomfortable if they were too big. In the metro, they most people spend their time watching tv on the tiny mobile phones screens (almost everybody at the metro holds a mobile phone in his/her hands and stares at it for different reasons) or taking a nap – I was fascinating to see that they have developed the capacity of taking a very quick nap standing on the chair and at the exact metro station, they can instantly get out of the train like nothing has happened. Amazing world. Men, though, are effeminate. In the metro train I was trying to take pictures of somebody with lovely fingers and nice face hidden behind a pair of dark glasses – I found out only later that she was actually a he. And besides all these, women and men behave many of them like children – they laugh and laugh and laugh and smile – they look like young spirits whose first reincarnation was in Japan – they have this funny way of starting laughing when they don’t know something –even at conferences, if they forget something or they can’t find the words, they start laughing so that you keep asking yourself whether something was wrong with yourself…..

I would not call Tokyo a romantic city – it doesn’t have anything that would make you think it was romantic. It has tall buildings made of concrete and steel and glass, it has highways built on 4 levels (crazy!), it has trains without drivers, it has a copy of the Statue of Liberty, a copy of everything, it has imitated many building and monuments and this makes you believe it does not have a strong personality……..but , for me, it had a beach, and it had a Rainbow Bridge over a bay, and it had this amazing view during the night that only filled my heart with joy. I got there by train, in the night and I was again surprised by the Japanese kindess- a Japanese guy let me and my colleague sit on the first row just close to the window so that we could get the best view.

I have to say that I had a moment when I wanted to escape, when I realized that I would never be able to fit in this word, or be happy there. Please don’t get me wrong, Tokyo is lovely, Japan was a unique experience and I will be grateful to the organizers of this trip my whole life, but I realized that certain limits cannot be surpassed and the reasons behind them are even stranger, especially for a civilization that is so advanced. I went to the Palace. The Imperial Palace. Before going there, I was picturing myself visiting the luxurious rooms of this place and enjoy its gardens. I was completely wrong. The visit had to last for one hour and we were all supposed to stay in line – more than that we could not stop and the guide told us that the guardians were not very happy with our behaviour as we were leaving huge space between us – crazy, undisciplined Europeans. We just visited the gardens, found out that the Japanese cheery trees actually do not have cherries and that we cannot step close to the bridge rail. Why? the explanation was the following – guardians fear that if something falls from your pocket you will jump after it over the bridge and fall into the river. And yes….I instantly recalled the tens of times something felt off from my pocket and I jumped over the bridge, from my window, mountain, balcony or any other height. I remembered when my phone fell from the 23rd floor and I jumped after it and thanx God, nothing bad happened…..come on….this is Japan – a world where you are not supposed to do whatever you want to do , but a world where you can do only what you have to do, you have to be attentive to signs, you have to watch your step if it says so, you have to climb up Fuji mountain only in a certain time of the year, you have to keep repeating CONTINUOSLY “welcome to our store” in the afternoon etc etc – yes, this I have to mention, as I went in the afternoon to a very popular small super market – I got in and I kept hearing and even shouting every body the same thing. I looked at them. They were talking and doing different things at the same time – most of them were just putting products in the shelves so they were shouting to the shelves the same thing over and over again. I later found out that they were saying something like “hello, welcome to our store” – I have never seen anything as automatic as this though. Even our guide told us it was automatic. And I asked her – ok, if it is like this, why anybody doesn’t ask them to stop repeating this over and over again because it is annoying – and you know what she said – that she got so used to this that she doesn’t even hear them. I was surprised to see them immersed in their own thoughts, making automatic gestures and saying automatic words. Like robots.

But these people are able to organize the most precise events, the most precise schedule and the perfect timing. They wanted to combine Japanese with European so that we would not feel completely estranged. They took us to Japanese restaurants and to European ones. They even took us to the restaurant where the movie “Lost in Translation” was shot. A very fancy, expensive restaurant and the basement of a 5 star hotel. A restaurant where I was not able to eat my tortellini immersed in the greatest quantity of FAT cheese and where I kept admiring the walls covered either in ceramic tiles or other things. This is where I also saw the greatest variety of pickled fruits and vegetables – grapes, grapefruits, lemons, egg-plants, cucumbers please name it. Japan has, I believe, also the greatest variety of dried food – I think they could dry anythng – from fruits and vegetables to any type of fish.