Strangers in Paradise

A night out in Shinjuku, navigating Tokyo and a bag mishap

This is the fourth part in a series about my travels through Southeast Asia.

In the beginning, my plan was perfect. I found a helmet bag from a military surplus store that closely resembled a $1475 Visvim bag. It had cost me $35, and I intended to carry it around Southeast Asia. Before leaving, I boasted to my girlfriend about my newfound frugality. I should have reconsidered when the zipper got stuck on my way out of the Chiang Mai airport. The flimsiness of the material should have given me pause. Now, I found myself in a hotel lobby in Tokyo, attempting to take my passport out, but the zipper got caught in the bag's lining. 

The cheerful receptionist rushed over to help me. She kept apologizing to me like she had cast a spell and accidentally cursed my bag. After a few attempts, she rushed into the backroom and returned with an older woman who spoke no English. Then it started. They pulled back on the zipper with all their might. I watched helplessly as the zipper inevitably cut its way further into the lining. I wanted to stop them, but the tempo of the situation did not suit Google Translate, and moreover, they were trying to help. I am 33 years old, but I have not yet figured out how to stop people's misguided attempts at being of service. The receptionist started apologizing with more alarm for no fault of her own. I have noticed people in Tokyo tend to be this way. In my 10 days here, I encountered a single train delay caused by a man jumping onto the track. It seemed that no one at the station knew what to do after this happened. The woman at the ticket booth kept running back and forth while the announcement system blared "Sorry for you inconvenience sorry for your inconvenience sorry for your inconvenience", without any pause or recommending any recourse. I wondered if the economic stagnation in Japan is caused by people sincerely trying to help each other and making things worse. Back at the hotel, there were now three women trying to open the bag. I asked them to stop using hand gestures and threw in a few apologies myself. I will buy a new bag I told them. 

Koyo san, who I met while shopping for a jacket, recommended a few places to shop for bags. He had actually drawn out their locations on a piece of paper, situating the shops in relation to the subway station. If you ask for directions or recommendations from a local in Tokyo, their first instinct, to my surprise, is not to name the place so that you can look it up on Google Maps. Instead, they first tell you where it is relative to landmarks like subway stations or parks. Then, when you blink at them with a tinge of fear and confusion in your eyes, like a rooster catching sight of a cat, they draw it out for you on a piece of paper. I found an explanation for this behavior later on - the addresses in Tokyo have no street names. It's just a bunch of numbers that represent a block and building number. It looks something like this 2-chome 3-1. Chome represents the block number, and 3-1 is the location of the building within the block. Roland Barthes, writing about Tokyo in the 1970s in his book Empire of Signs, complained about the same phenomenon. I was in esteemed company. 

Later in the evening, I set about to buy the bag. I used Google Maps until I got to the entrance of a large mall, which snaked underground and connected to a maze of other malls, some below and others above ground. At this point, I uncrumbled the piece of paper with Koyo san's directions. There are far fewer tourists in the underground malls of Shinjuku, likely because they are difficult to navigate. Google Maps does not work here, and there are very few directions provided. It seems to me these tunnels are where the locals shop. The above ground is for TikTokkers and tourists. I ended up in a store that fit Koyo san's description. There were bags there, and I bought one. Then, while trying to make my way above ground to the land of Tiktokkers, I realized I had been to the wrong shop. But the mission was completed. Sloppily. 

Next, I made my way to the Shinjuku Golden Gai, a dizzying array of small bars stacked above one another with narrow alleyways to walk between them. I had become familiar with the area from Yasujiro Ozu's movies, which always had several scenes of people eating and drinking, and it was inevitably at the Golden Gai. The Netflix show Midnight Diner was also set here. Unlike the underground malls, the illegibility of the Golden Gai bars is merely aesthetic. This is a part of Tokyo that has been mined for content for the last 20 years. Every nook and cranny seems familiar even if you have never been here or even looked it up because you have seen the images or the images inspired by the images of Golden Gai. There are several bars in the alley that are hostile to tourists, and they try to keep us away with unmarked doors or signs that say that you need a membership to enter and signs prohibiting photographs. The spirit of the small Japanese bars, or the few that I've been to, is that you talk to strangers there because the space is too tight and cozy to ignore the other. Perhaps the tourists did not keep up with this spirit. I decided to investigate while drinking gin and tonics. 

I went to three bars. The first one had three older white men huddled in a corner, talking about the wild vacations of their past. The bartender played Jpop on YouTube with ads in between that she did not skip. The second bar had a bartender over eager to please everyone. I spoke to an Indian couple out on their first night in Tokyo. When they were not asking me what places I recommend, they looked at their phones for places to go to. When I walked into the third bar, two young women were talking about the Shibuya scramble - a busy four-way intersection where the crowds crossing the street look like slime mold growing under a microscope. This seemed insignificant to me, perhaps because I grew up in a dense city. I crossed the Shibuya scramble several times on my walk back to my hotel and observed people stopping right in the middle of the road and raising their fists so that their friends could take a photo of them defying the maddening crowds. Going against the grain. These individuals usually carried a big camera set up and seemed like influencers. I remarked about how annoying the influencers were to the two women at the bar, and there was silence followed by, "Yeah, I want to take a picture there too." 

After several failed attempts at small talk with strangers, I was walking back to the hotel with my new bag and fruit sandwich from 7/11 when a black man stopped me and asked in an accent that seemed vaguely African, "Where are you from my friend?". He was friendly, so I told him I was from India. Throughout the trip, I had been oscillating between saying that I'm from Texas or India based on what status markers the questioner was looking for. He said he was from Ghana and then asked, "What are you up to tonight? Do you want to go to a titty bar?". He made it sound like an old English aristocrat inviting a friend to high tea, so I gave him a fist bump and walked back to the hotel. I had other matters to attend to, which you would understand if you've ever had a Japanese 7/11 fruit sandwich.