Japan, Five Weeks, Ten Missions
My apartment is already someone else’s problem. I’ve sublet it to a gay Spanish couple who are free to use the furniture however they see fit, and tomorrow morning at 9:45 I fly out of Berlin headed east. Five weeks in Japan. I’ve been going on about this trip for months—preparation after preparation, packing logistics, obsessive research—while everyone around me just wanted to see girls fitting their fists in their mouths. Fair enough. It’s finally happening.
The routing is not elegant: Berlin to Moscow, six-hour layover at the airport where I will sit, stand, walk, and stare at walls in full existential mode, then onward to Narita, landing Wednesday at 10:20. I’m hoping the Russian pilot doesn’t feel compelled to show us a weapons factory located near a totally harmless volcano.
I have a list. Not because I’m a planner by nature—I’m not—but because without one I’ll drift between convenience stores and incomprehensible television for five weeks and come home with nothing. The best things always happen off-list, but the list is what gets you out of the hotel.
One: the Tokyo Tower. I’ve lived in Berlin for nearly five years and I’ve never once been up the TV tower. Embarrassing. I’m correcting the error in a different city, in a taller building. Two: watch a Japanese film in a Japanese cinema in Japanese—just to sit in the dark with all that sound washing over me and understand nothing. Three: buy a Game Boy Light with some games, because I’ve just invented the concept of "retromania" and the Game Boy Light is its patron saint. Four: Super Potato in Akihabara, the legendary retro game shop, which will deepen the aforementioned condition to clinical levels.
Five: kiss a Japanese girl. Look how tender I’ve become—I wrote "kiss," not "fuck." Maybe some light groping. Romance, basically. (Eriko Nakao excluded—she can have my children whenever she likes.) Six: conveyor belt sushi. Everything in life should work this way—you sit, things pass, you take what you want. Seven: Mount Fuji. I am objectively the worst hiker alive, but this is non-negotiable. If my legs give out halfway up I’ll let the crowd drag me to the summit by sheer proximity.
Eight: a beach with actual sand. Nine: a night in a capsule hotel or one of those internet café sleeping pods where people end up when they miss the last train or simply ran out of money. I find this completely sympathetic—there’s a real life going on in those little compartments. Ten: catch them all. Pokémon. You understand.
I know these are modest goals. I’m not going to piss on a shrine or pick a fight with the imperial family—I genuinely love this country, and besides, the really good shit always arrives when you’re not looking for it. The list is just the scaffold. The actual trip is whatever falls through the gaps between the missions, with whoever happens to be there.
This is a lifelong dream—the second biggest, right after getting obscenely rich and employing a drug dealer who also does the cleaning and reads to me in the evenings. Japan, I’m coming. Schoolgirls with tentacles.