Tokyo through Expat Eyes
The joys and sorrows of daily life as an expat in The Big Sushi
I arrived in Japan almost 20 years ago (on what was meant to be a three-year overseas adventure, but that’s another story). After four years of living in the inaka countryside of northernmost Japan, Hokkaido, I moved to Tokyo and have been here ever since. The answers below are the most recent iteration of an ongoing, evolving answer to questions which have popped up in online forums such as Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, Quora, and TripAdvisor: Why are you in Tokyo? What are the up- and downsides of living in The Big Mikan? Herewith, some provisional answers…
Since I wanna finish on a positive note, I’ll start with the downsides of life in Tokyo:
- Recently, there has been some concern about war on the Korean peninsula, and a North Korean attack on Japan. I used to think such an attack unlikely, until I learned more about the troubled relationship between North Korea and Japan. Some pundits now think the chance of war is better than 50/50, though it just doesn’t feel that real here on the ground. I’ve been posting about the war of words, and how it appears from a Tokyo expats point of view, on Nuclear Nightmares over Tokyo
- More realistically, but also more worringly perhaps, earthquakes, typhoons, and just the slightest chance that Mount Fujisan will erupt Lloyd’s insurance declared in 2015 that Tokyo was the world’s second-riskiest city in the world for natural and manmade disasters (beaten only by Taipei, Taiwan), a rating which echoes pre-eminent volcanologist Professor Bill McGuire’s declaration that Tokyo is “the city waiting to die.” Thanks, Bill.
- Urban sprawl: from the window of a train, it’s possible to travel for hours out of Tokyo, for hundreds and hundreds of miles along Japan’s most populous corridor, aka the Taiheiyō Belt (太平洋ベルト) following the Pacific coast, one grey-concrete-and-tile city blending into the next. Depending on how you count it, the population of Tokyo is around 12 million; for the GTA (Greater Tokyo Area the number jumps to 38 million; the Tokyo megalopolis sprawls to include a staggering 82 million.
- You feel the weight of all those people when you travel Tokyo’s trains, especially at rush hour. I mean, according to Wikipedia, Shinjuku Stationalone sees almost 4 million passengers per day. That’s more than the entire population of my hometown, Toronto, moving through one station. Every day. Shinjuku has 36 platforms, and over 200 exits. No wonder that, even after 16 years, I still got lost there sometimes…
- Life revolves around work: trains, bars, stores, everything works around the needs of office and other workers (you can use this to your advantage if you are just visiting, and so can hit busy spots such as Shinjuku in off-peak hours)
- The average roundtrip commute time in Tokyo is around 1 3/4 hours; mine times out at over 2 hours door to door
- The commuter expresses into the city are standing-room only by 6am
- Karoshi, death by overwork, is a real thing; more typically, long hours are the norm
- Public transit is expensive, time consuming, and often confusing, requiring multiple transfers between different train lines and/or buses, each which can require a different ticket
- Lack of privacy and personal space; my neighbours just built a daycare less than a metre from my house! But that’s another story…
- Pedestrians get almost little respect from cyclists and less from drivers. At crosswalks, this can be downright dangerous. Walkers beware.
- Brutal summers: highs of 38 degrees Celsius and humidity which can reach 98% means humidex “feels like” ratings up to 68; temps can stay above 25 for weeks at a time, even in the “tropical nights”
- The countryside around Tokyo, has been planted with — literally — millions of allergy-inducing Japanese cedar trees whose pollen wafts through the city
- I can’t find a population count for the number of crows that live in Tokyo, but there are enough that Ishihara, the once-infamous governor of Tokyo, declared war on the murders of crows in the city. No surprise, Ishihara lost… I got swarmed by a murder of crows once, on the northern island of Rebun, but that’s another story…
- Despite its size, outside of certain neighbourhoods Tokyo lacks the cosmopolitan vibe of other world-class cities: people who don’t look Japanese stand out
Those are some of the downsides of life as a long-term expat in Tokyo. On balance, however, there’s more upsides than downs (that’s why I’m still here!), so I’ve saved the best for last:
- I’m not actually a big-city person, and decided a long ago I could never live in the constant over-stimulation of a place like Manhattan, but Tokyo works amazingly well for such a big, at-times overwhelming urban environment
- Tokyo is rightly famous for its cleanness, safety, and efficiency of living cheek-by-jowl with 37.8 million neighbours in the largest metropolitan area in the world. Recently, the city came up tops on The Economist magazine’s Safe City Index, which ranks cities by digital, health, infrastructure, and personal security.
- Speaking of infrastructure, Tokyo’s train system has gotta be one of the wonders of the modern world. The trains run on time. On time. Day in and day out, barring severe weather and the occasional suicide. I suspect that the popular image of Japan as an ultra-efficient country (hint: in many ways, Japan is anything but; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing) comes in large part from visitors’ encounters with the trains. These trains also extend to the countryside and surrounding mountains.
- All those on-time trains means you can easily live in quieter parts of the city, such as my half-city, half-countryside neighbourhood in west Tokyo: a “rural suburbia” of cabbage patches, blueberry orchards, convenience stores, and sushi restaurants. My neighbour had a goat! Every morning I wake to a rooster. But I’ve got a rice shop, restaurants, convenience stores, a pharmacy superstore, and gym all within five minutes of my house.
- Oh, yes: prefectural Tokyo has countryside within its borders; also mountainous national parks and even a chain of islands, some with active volcanoes, which stretch a few thousand kilometres south of here of the city itself.
- The “bright lights, big city” vibe; always stimulating, if sometimes to the point of being overwhelming…
- The cool little neighbourhoods: Tokyo from a certain distance appears to be a monolithic, rather homogeneous urban sprawl; up close and personal, though, it’s actually a city of local neighbourhoods, just like my hometown Toronto, but on a much grander scale. Turn left on a familiar street instead of right, and you can discover whole new aspects of the city you’ve never seen before — and never guessed existed. Actually, I find all the sidestreets and hidden corners of the city so compelling that I often carry a camera with my on the daily commute, or in daily life, and snap pics along the way. I call this kind of psychogeographic photo drift project Tokyo Kills Me.
- Still, most expats live, work, and play in certain neighbourhoods: Kichijoji, Ikebukuro, and Shinjuku in the west end, Ebisu-Hiro-o, Roppongi, and Azabu south-central, Shinagawa to the east. This concentration of gaikokujin — the polite term for foreigners — can make the city feel much smaller, more like a cluster of villages or towns linked by rail than a megalopolis. It’s possible to spend your entire time in Tokyo in a few foreign-friendly parts of town, and see familiar faces every day. Many gaijin– the casual, sometimes rude term for foreigners — do.
- Despite the famous reserve of Tokyoites, and the every-man-for-himself commute experience, people in Tokyo are often downright friendly and helpful. Sometimes just looking like a stranded tourist is enough for someone — usually a younger person — to lead you in the right direction. Sometimes literally, going out of their way to make sure you get to the right address, bus stop, or train platform.
- The other three seasons besides summer are all great. Autumn is mild, winter has lots of sunny days, and in spring of course there’s the cherry blossoms which set off like little pink explosions in parfks and gardens around the city. This being Japan, the event has been turned into both a rarefied art in the arrangement of the trees, branches, and blossoms, and a festival: local families, friends, and company groups each, drink, and get get happily trashed under the spreading boughs.
- omotenashi, service with a smile
- pride in workmanship — no-one here does things in a half-a**ed way (took me years to get my own work ethic up to speed…)
- Speaking of the outdoors, I was amazed to discover that ultra-modern, hi tech, postmodern, day-after-tomorrowland urban Tokyo — inspiration for the dystopia in the Blade Runner movies — actually has a lot of beautiful nature to explore. A couple of hours by public transit from our front door and we’re in wild mountains, home to bear and boar and mythic creatures such as kappa and tengu
- You wouldn’t know it from the trainloads of blue- and black-suited office workers on the commuter trains, but Tokyoites are creative and fashionable. “Harajuku girls” is just the beginning…
- Compared to Toronto, at least, my hometown, Tokyo has a wealth of museums large, medium, and small, with a diverse range of local and international art on display. There are also concert venues, from 40,000-seat Tokyo Dome to the “live houses” of Shimo-Kitazawa, Koenji, Kichijoji and other hip ‘hoods.
- Camera superstores such as Yodobashi and Biq Camera are adult-sized tech geek toy stores. Bonus points to Bicqlo in Shinjuku, which combines a full-featured Bic electronics shop with a Uniqlo. Crazy-popular with tourists
- Modern architecture, such as the Tokyo Kokusai Forum, and Roppongi Hills to name just two
- Traditional architecture, such as as the Kabuki-za theatre in Ginza or Meiju Jingu shrine near Harajuku
A few final considerations:
Tokyo is a great base to explore the rest of Japan, from the Chichibu/Okutama mountains in the city’s west, to the Japan Alps, and the 6,000+ islands strung like Mikimoto pearls on a 3,000 kilometre archipelago from subarctic Hokkaido in the north to semitropical Iriomote in the south.
I love living in a cultural and language environment other than the one in which I was raised: reminds me almost daily that life is an ongoing adventure (and the challenges of a bilingual life should help fight off early onset :-))
Finally, and last but not least as they say, the trials, tribulations, and rewards of a cross-cultural, “international marriage” :-) I enjoyed being single in Tokyo, just as I now enjoy the adventure of having someone to whom “I will park my bike next to for the rest of my life,” as we happened to discuss it on a recent weekend morning… Plus, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the challenges of such a marriage should help stave off that early onset — for both of us :-)
I’m sure other thoughts will arise, but these are the ones which seem most relevant to me right now. Your mileage may vary (and I look forward to reading about your experiences)…
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“Writing about where you stay often becomes your favourite pastime if you are an expatriate” a wise blogger once wrote. Couldn’t agree more. But then, I’ve always enjoyed writing about places real and imagined, almost as if they were characters in stories. You can check out my photos and writing about Tokyo, Japan, and the rest of the world here.
