vol.1 “People Passing Through Tokyo Station“

Next stop: Tokyo, Tokyo.

The conductor’s announcement of the arrival station made me feel as if I had just arrived in Tokyo. It has been less than 10 years since I moved to Tokyo, and I get off and pass through Tokyo Station several times a year, so it is not that I am not familiar with the station, but perhaps my senses are sharpened by visiting the station again with the purpose of “observing Tokyo Station,” and the place name “Tokyo” once again tickles my ears with its sweet sound. I am not sure if my senses are sharpened by visiting Tokyo Station again to observe it.

In this series of articles, I will observe the streets and people of the Yaesu, Nihonbashi, and Kyobashi areas. To explore the theme of the first installment, “People Passing Through Tokyo Station,” I left the Yaesu exit ticket gate at 9:30 in the morning on a day in early November.

As I descended the stairs of the station, which was busy with men and women of all ages carrying large luggage due to the holiday, I found that many stores had not yet opened in Tokyo Station Ichibangai. In front of a shuttered JUMP store (mainly selling official Weekly Shonen Jump merchandise), a group of five junior or senior high school students, each wearing a school uniform and carrying a large backpack, were gathered around, and one of them was wearing Mickey Mouse-shaped blue sunglasses and sitting in what is called One of them was wearing Mickey Mouse-shaped blue sunglasses and sitting in a so-called “poop-sitting” position. However, from their mood, I guess they are not delinquents at all, but students on a school excursion who are just fooling around and imitating delinquents.

With them by my side, I headed for “Aroma Coffee Yaesu,” the oldest coffee shop in Yaetica (Yaesu underground shopping arcade), established in 1970. The place seemed to be crowded from morning, and we were shown to our seats after standing in line for about five minutes. Although the station is directly connected to the station, it is still a rather long walk from the ticket gate, and there were few people with large luggage, but rather many people who looked like local residents or local workers.

The waiter greeted an elderly couple who seemed to be regulars at the next table, saying “Ohayo gozaimasu (good morning)” instead of “irasshaimase (welcome). I greeted them back smilingly and ordered two coffees and two mornings, and we each began to silently read a book with a Maruzen book cover. I wondered if they had bought their books at the nearby Maruzen Nihonbashi store, and if so, it was an ideal date!　I was secretly excited.

My idea of an ideal date would be a date where each of us buys a book we are interested in at a bookstore, and then each of us reads it at a coffee shop.

When the morning toast was placed on the table, the couple began a quiet conversation as they spread jam on the toast. Thinking that it would be ideal to have an occasional conversation like this ……, I too spread jam on my toast, bite into a piece of toast, sip a hot “café au lait,” and start writing this manuscript.

On a chair at the table across from me is a Gucci bag, the owner of which seems to be a researcher.

She is apparently a researcher. “When you work and travel around overseas, you start to drift away from the image of the average Japanese woman, don’t you?　That’s why they lose confidence in love. I hear that kind of thing all the time.

Even if you have a doctorate?

Well, even if you have a good job, you still want to be …… what do you call it?

But you still want to be chosen by one person?

Oh, yeah!

I think to myself, “Well, even if I have a PhD and a Gucci bag, I may not have confidence in love, but I may lose it in exchange.

Amidst the incessant stream of customers, three foreign tourists with carry-on bags come down the stairs: a woman wearing a Nintendo logo T-shirt and carrying a Pokémon tote bag, and two men. The woman raises her tattooed arm and orders three blends.

Come to think of it, I see rather a lot of foreign tourists with the combination of one woman and two men, but I don’t think I see a Japanese version of that, or perhaps I don’t have the image of traveling with that combination. As I write this, I am reminded of a story I heard a long time ago about a senior student in college who went on a trip with one woman and two men, and only one of the men returned home before the other because of a dispute during the trip.

Around noon, we arrived at the bus terminal near the Yaesu Chuo Exit. From here, express buses depart from and arrive at not only the Kanto area but also regional cities in Tohoku, Kansai, and Chugoku regions.

There is a woman smiling and waving her hands in the air in the direction of a bus bound for Narita, which has just departed. At the bus stop next to her is a foreigner standing and eating a chirashizushi bento. Behind her are three women taking selfies. A volunteer guide wearing a checkered jacket passes between them. A junior high school brass band of about 20 students line up in a row, rolling their carry-on bags as they weave their way across the street. A woman speaking Chinese on the phone walks right and left. Nearby, I hear a cat meow, and upon closer inspection, I see a white kitten, no more than a year old, still in its pet carrier bag with its tags still attached, meowing, meowing, meowing, shaking its whole body, and looking out the window. It seems that humans are not the only ones who are perplexed when they come to Tokyo Station.

Returning to the station, the last stop of the day was Starbucks, located in the waiting area inside the Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen ticket gates.

As I sat at the counter, the smell of perfume wafted through the air, and when I looked to the side, I saw a foreign woman wearing a Jutsu Kaisen T-shirt crying for some reason, and the woman accompanying her was hugging and comforting her. After a while, the crying woman left, and about a minute later, the woman who had been comforting her left. I wondered if they would come back soon, but no, no matter how safe Japan is, there is no way they would secure their seats like this. Or, for that matter, would they forget it like this?

Should I go after him with it, but I don’t know where it went? Should I deliver it to the station staff, but in the meantime, the girls might come back, and in the meantime, I might miss the bullet train. If I let it go and if someone tries to take this phone away. I imagined grabbing her arm and asking her, “What are you going to do with that?

Then the crying woman said “Oh!” and scuttled back to retrieve the phone. It seems that people sometimes forget things in unexpected ways. I say to the person’s back in my mind. Don’t worry, I’ve kept an eye on your phone so no one has laid a finger on it.

This waiting area is a few steps up and there is a walkway right in front of the counter where you can see people coming and going. A station attendant pushes a wheelchair down the ramp, passing a group of three businessmen returning from a business trip with paper bags of Tokyo Bananas under their arms.

People coming to Tokyo, people returning from Tokyo, people returning to Tokyo, people leaving Tokyo.

As I pass the Shinkansen terminal at Tokyo Station, I suddenly wonder what kind of person I am.

Now I am just an eccentric person who bought a ticket and is at the Shinkansen station, but when I took the Shinkansen to Tokyo and got off at the Tokyo station, I was a visitor to Tokyo. I am currently living in Tokyo.

I have not even settled on a place to call home or hometown, so when I return home, am I a person returning from Tokyo?　Am I the one who leaves Tokyo?　When I return from a trip home, am I a person returning to Tokyo?　Am I someone who came to Tokyo?

The place where I was born is clear. The place where I grew up generally refers to the land where I spent my childhood, but I feel that I grew up more mentally from age 18 to 28 than from age 10 to 18. So where is the place where I grew up? Where is the place to which I return?

Passing through Tokyo Station are a wide variety of people. There are many different districts in Tokyo, each with its own image of the people who gather there, but it is difficult to find a characteristic of Tokyo Station that says “this is the type of people who gather there. On the contrary, there are probably not many places where as many people gather as in Tokyo Station.

So I am sure that many people just like me, who do not know where they grew up or where they go back to, pass by and pass each other at Tokyo Station. When I think of this, Tokyo Station seems a little more like a friendly place than it has been in the past.

Photo by Shuhei Hatano