When Wee Yin was a baby I walked everywhere. We lived right beside one of the Metro stations in Tokyo but it was very old and had four flights of stairs with no lift or elevator. With the best will in the world I wasn’t folding a buggy and lugging it, me and Wee Yin up and down that so walking it was. If it was within an hour and a half walk of the house then it was reachable. I would often take the long way round just to avoid the hills (in the same way that Nigel Havers “doesn’t do electric shocks” I don’t do hills) and some of the more Wacky-Races-like of the main roads were avoided but on the whole I enjoyed my walks.
One of the things that surprised me most about Tokyo was how a street could have small rickety buildings next to gleaming office blocks. A small wooden yakitori stand would lean up against a modern apartment and shopping complex. Outside one door would be old plastic boxes filled with flowers and outside the next would be a liveried doorman.
Our original apartment building in Tokyo was considered old (it was built in 1973) but was next to a very modern shopping centre. Outside this centre there was a small canvas tent and every night a man would set up a portable teppanyaki stand inside it and sell food accompanied with small bottles of beer he would take from a picnic coolbox. It was known to the British contingent as The Road-diggers Arms and as it was open until 5 in the morning it was a late night food stop for people returning from the hotspots of Roppongi and Kabuki-cho.
I miss walking past all these places. There was an area we used to walk through that was known as The Place Of Men. It was full of salarymen in their short sleeved white shirts, construction workers in their billowing blue trousers and canvas tabi boots, and students in their tipped hair and military blazers. It was a mystery to me who all these men were and why they congregated in this one area. The only thing they had in common was that they were all carefully studying newspapers. I couldn’t work it out until I was walking through the area with a female Japanese colleague of C’s and she became very uncomfortable. She told me that the area was notorious for housing illegal gambling dens and for crime. I had been totally oblivious to this as I had walked through, bowing and o-haiyo gozaimasu-ing anyone who caught my eye.
Yet again I try to write about Tokyo and go off on a totally unrelated tangent. One day I will get it straight in my head – that day is obviously not today.
Holiday Box
Terry Hall and Salad
