Excerpt from Gaijin Live Next Door
To say we were unprepared for Japan is an understatement of no small proportions. A few weeks before we arrived, we hadn’t even been certain we were headed that way. The direction of our journey had turned toward the Land of the Rising Sun only after a chance meeting in a Chungking Mansions elevator in Hong Kong.
“Korea’s no longer a go.” Our fellow traveler confirmed what we had heard in Sydney. “They’re cracking down. You need a degree at the very least, and jobs have dried up. But Japan is wide open.” And with little more than that to go on, we bought one-way tickets to Tokyo instead of Seoul. Beyond that, we had no plan at all.
We landed at Narita International Airport in early April afternoon rain. As soon as we entered the arrivals hall, it was obvious we weren’t in Kansas anymore. The signs directing inbound passengers were clear. Japanese this way, Aliens over there. We didn’t seem to belong in either category. I didn’t know whether to be mildly confused or profoundly offended, and I wondered exactly how I was going to answer the inevitable question, “Where are you from?” Should I launch into a long, convoluted explanation about how we were actually heading for Venus, but our spaceship had been thrown off course by the rings of Saturn and we were forced to drop out of warp speed and de-cloak just south of Jupiter? Maybe the flight from Hong Kong had taken us off-planet and this really wasn’t Earth. Though I was unaware of it then, I would begin to believe this was in fact the case in about three hours’ time.
Our dog-eared passports drew some suspicion at Immigration Control, overflowing as they were with illegible rubber stamp imprints from countless other Asian bureaucracies. It was hardly our fault that some of the countries we had recently visited liked to take up several valuable pages with their entry and exit stamps, or that the Australian Government refused to issue extra pages when passports were filled, even if they were still valid for two more years.
We didn’t do much to impress the team at the customs desk either. After some heavy eyeballing of our scruffy backpacks and the baby on my back, there was a difficult conversation about where we would be staying, how long we planned to stay, the purpose of our visit to Japan, and how much money we had. It was difficult because we had no plan and no firm answers to those questions. Since James was arriving on a working holiday visa and Mani and I had only 90-day tourist visas, we must have appeared suspicious. In similar circumstances, I doubt two scruffy foreigners would have been allowed to enter Australia, but apparently, we satisfied the stern, uniformed agent who held our fate in his white-gloved hands, along with our bruised and battered passports. Some food items we were carrying were of greater concern.
Knowing it might be quite some time before we saw our beloved Vegemite again, I’d managed to squeeze a couple of small jars of my favorite toast topping into one of the packs, along with some caffeine-free drink powder and a box of breakfast cereal.
“You have banana?” The unsmiling customs officer pointed an accusatory finger at the picture of some sliced banana in a bowl of cereal that adorned the packet of cereal at the bottom of one of our bags. Like a dog following the scent of a bone, he’d had to dig a long way to find the one thing that could shoot down our entire trip.
What the…? Had he never seen a box of cereal before? It’s not like it comes out of the box with fresh fruit and milk in place, ready to eat. James stumbled over the explanation, clearly worried that he wasn’t making sense.
“No. It’s just a serving suggestion. You have to add the banana. If you want. There is no banana. We have no banana.” It was getting worse.
“No banana?”
“No! No banana!” James shook his head and waved his hands over the picture, as if the offending fruit would magically disappear. He tried a different tack. “Yes! No banana!”
“Okay. Enter this way.” He dismissed us without making eye contact, though I noticed he watched in mild disgust as we crammed all our personal effects back into the bags whichever way they would fit. They no longer did. I had spent quite a bit of effort pre-flight rolling all our clothes into neat cylinders so that everything we needed got to accompany us on the journey. I wasn’t happy, but I was also a bit scared. Airport arrival halls had a strange effect on me. I always suffered an incredible, and unwarranted, surge of guilt for some unnamed crime that would see me handcuffed and hauled away, never to be heard of again.
Armed with only a dog-eared and out of date copy of the Lonely Planet™ guide to Japan, we headed for the banks of public phones, conspicuous in their luminous, fluro-green covers. For the next six hours, James entertained Mani, and I shoveled coins into the slots like a crazed gambling addict, making phone call after phone call to potential accommodation venues.
But my pleas for a room for even one night fell on unsympathetic ears. Deja vu. It was Perth all over again, only more distressing. This was a whole other country, and one in which we knew no one, nor the language. I knew that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, getting into Japan and setting up house; I guess I just didn’t expect it to be this hard either. I thought I was tougher than this. I was wrong.
At first it was just a matter of every hostel being fully booked, but soon the real reason for the refusals came tumbling out — “We don’t want any baby!”
I tried not to crumple, though inwardly I was crushed. My son was a quiet baby. He wasn’t a crier. Fuck! We had traveled from one side of Australia to the other on a non-stop bloody bus when he was six weeks old and no one even knew he was there. I started to cry in frustration. I started to beg. That only made them angry. It wasn’t until years later that I understood how ‘un-Japanese’ I had behaved; I had upset their wa (harmony).
“Please! We have nowhere else to go. We’re still at the airport. I don’t know what else to do.” My head was full of exclamation marks. It wasn’t the first time that evening I had spoken to the guy on the other end of this call, but I wasn’t making any headway. I knew he had a room because the first time I’d called, I didn’t mention the baby until he had confirmed that he had availability. My subterfuge didn’t work.
He started to lecture me. “I don’t think much of your holiday planning. Japan is very expensive. If you don’t have a plan, you will spend a lot of money here.”
Holiday? I wanted to scream at him. We had arrived here to look for work and to start a new life with a nine-month-old baby and only the contents of two backpacks. We must surely be insane. It wasn’t going to be a picnic, let alone a holiday. But he was more steadfast in his denial than I was at breaking down the walls he threw up. I was losing the will to live. And it was all starting to feel like a huge mistake. I hung up the receiver, having achieved nothing.
Completely disheartened now, I trudged back to the row of seats that looked destined to become our beds for the night and fell into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, tired, emotional, defeated, and thoroughly pissed. James and Mani were playing a game of peek-a-boo with one of the boarding passes.
“It’s your turn,” I said in a monotone. James looked at me blankly, as if he were unable to comprehend the fact that I still hadn’t managed to find a room for the night. “I’m fucking over it!”
Though he didn’t persist for as long as I had, he had no success either, and deemed it pointless. I had already called every guest house in the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area.
There was no other choice than to head over to the official hotel reservation counter with our tails between our legs, broken and defeated. I’d been on the phone almost continuously for over six hours, apart from crying breaks, and my fingers ached from alternately dialing numbers and wringing my hands in despair. The last train had long since left on its 60-kilometer journey to Tokyo Station, so the only remaining option was the Limousine Bus, a fancy name for an ordinary coach with blue velour seats and lights in the floor of the aisle.
It was a quiet, dejected, one-hour ride, just the three of us and the driver, on a dimly lit, luxury coach. I stared out the window as the orange neon lights of the freeway flashed past, mesmerized by them and the rain spattering the windows. Even the sky was crying. We arrived at Tokyo Station around midnight with a booking for a hotel on the Ginza with a price tag that we could not afford if our stay in Japan was going to last longer than a few days.
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Want to read the rest of the story? You can pick up a copy on Amazon right here: Gaijin Live Next Door: Eight Years in Japan
