What Fits in Two Bags
Three weeks. That’s all that’s left before I land in Tokyo and whoever I am in this city stops being relevant. I’ve been getting emails asking about the logistics—visa, money, accommodation, language—so here’s what I know, dressed up as wisdom I don’t entirely have yet.
Japan has been a mythology to me since I was a kid. Sailor Moon first, then anime magazines, then terrible J-Pop I was deeply sincere about. The images that stuck: lurid TV game shows, dense neon city blocks, ancient shrines twenty meters from a convenience store. A country that seemed to exist at a frequency nobody else was broadcasting on. What I didn’t clock for years is that it isn’t actually unreachable. I work online—I can do that from anywhere. I’m not too old or too broke or too paralyzed to go. So at some point "someday" stopped being a sentence and I bought a plane ticket.
Before my first visit I already knew people there—bloggers, photographers, artists I’d been writing to online. That turned out to matter enormously. Tokyo without at least one local contact is a city that will cheerfully defeat you. Japanese bureaucracy assumes you can read kanji. Banking, transit cards, ordering food from a ticket machine at a ramen counter—these aren’t things you improvise through with good intentions. Be kind to people online. Some of them will save you later.
The visa, at least, is simple if you’re under thirty. The working holiday visa is valid for a year and the requirements are straightforward: proof of a return flight, valid health insurance, and enough savings to suggest you won’t immediately become their problem. Apply directly at the Japanese Embassy. Mine came back in under a week. It is, by any bureaucratic standard, almost suspiciously easy—assuming you’re not walking in there with a criminal record.
Getting rid of everything has been the strangest part. Things that actually matter—certain books, letters, objects I’d be gutted to lose—I’m shipping home to rot in a family basement. Everything else I sold, gave away, loaned out, or threw into the street. There’s a clarity to it I wasn’t expecting. When you compress your life down to what fits in two bags, you realize how much of it was just filling space.
On my last trip I worked out of a place called THE TERMINAL in Harajuku—a co-working café above a clothing shop, somewhere between a studio and a reading room. Around three euros an hour or ten for the full day, free coffee and magazines, pay separately for actual food. Everyone brings their own laptop but iMacs are there if you need them. Exhibitions and events happen occasionally. It has the feeling of a place run by people who actually like what they do, which anywhere is rare enough to seek out.
I’ll be living in a SAKURA HOUSE apartment in Setagaya—the most populous ward in the city, which tells you something about what Tokyo’s scale actually means. Seven hundred euros a month with a discount applied. A friend named Hannah lived in one of their places a few years back and said it worked out fine, which is about the strongest endorsement I can give somewhere I haven’t slept in yet.
Is Tokyo expensive? More than Berlin, yes—but then everything is more expensive than Berlin, which has spent decades being improbably cheap for a capital city. The way you go broke in Tokyo is the same way you go broke anywhere: restaurants for every meal, taxis instead of trains, clubs that charge you just for walking through the door. The konbinis—the 7-Elevens and Family Marts and Lawsons open twenty-four hours on every third corner—are the real survival mechanism. Cheap, decent, always there at two in the morning when you need something that resembles food. Fresh fruit is the one thing that will make you audibly gasp at the price. Aeroflot had the best deal on flights the last time, somewhere north of five hundred euros return with a six-hour layover in Moscow thrown in for atmosphere.
My Japanese is, charitably, an embarrassment. After years of classes and a language exchange partner I somehow never progressed beyond a handful of sentences all communicating roughly the same information: hello, I’m Marcel, my blue umbrella has asthma. Bring a phrasebook. English will carry you through the Apple Store and not much further. Danny Choo—an otaku blogger who moved from England to Japan and ended up working in Japanese television—wrote extensively about learning the language properly, and his advice is better than anything I could offer on the subject.
Since it always comes up: yes, vending machines selling used underwear are a real phenomenon, though the reality is considerably less exciting than the mythology. The packaging comes with a photo and a kiss-print and there’s a non-trivial probability the shop owner wore them himself, grinning at you as you head home with your sweet-smelling purchase. Try actual people instead. They’re better conversation and they smell just as good.
Three weeks. I’ll be writing from there.