Baffled
I’m starting a new series of photos for the next lunar cycle, roughly entitled “New Beginnings.” The first photo of this new beginning is a bank of transit kiosks at Tokyo’s Haneda International Terminal. After 100 days in Tokyo, I’d be able to look at this photo and know exactly which kiosk to choose and what to purchase for any situation. But this photo was taken on my first day in Japan, at 6:04 am in the morning after traveling for 24 hours, and the information overload was entirely baffling and frightening.
For ten minutes, I watched folks line up and purchase tickets. Then I went and sat down and thought and breathed and processed. Then I went and watched again. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was setting a pattern I would use over and over while navigating the strange-yet-familiar-yet-strange sushi roll of Japan. The pattern is this:
Leave plenty of time so you’re not rushed. Having the luxury of rolling slow in rushed places halves your anxiety and thought processes. And sometimes going slow completely eliminates anxiety.
Watch long enough to see at least two foreigners and maybe half a dozen locals do whatever it is you want to do. You’ll see where the foreigners go wrong, and the locals will give you a good average of what the “right” way may look like.
Be willing to look and act as authentically stupid and out of place as you are. You’re a dumb foreigner, and pretending you’re not makes you look more dumb and foreign. When you are an ignorant American who speaks no Japanese and are baffled, let that quizzical look show. You’ll get a bit more patience from everyone waiting on you, and maybe even some help. Pair that with an ever-refined practice of bowing and saying “sumimasen” (and really trying to figure out how to do both appropriately) will make life so much easier.
When I finally got in line for the transit kiosks, I’d already done this three-step process for (in order of difficulty, starting with the easiest first):
entering the bathroom (look for the blue man symbol, verify other men walked in, then walk in!),
exchanging my money (super easy),
going through immigration (use the QR code system (Google it)),
going through customs (QR again, but a bit more tricky),
simply exiting customs, because raw and wild and independent Tokyo was on the other side (which was the same feeling I had when I left the hospital with my newborn baby and the woman whom I would marry ten days later — “thank God we’re out of that bureaucratic nightmare” and then “oh God who said I could be trusted outside the safety of that comforting bureaucracy”),
purchasing a coffee (there are numerous intricacies to Japanese ordering and paying and picking up, which I never really did figure out), and
getting my phone to connect to the Japanese wireless system (a half hour of endless technological loops until I finally chose one-time access instead of monthly subscription, which then magically enabled me to purchase it. I just did one time subscriptions for four months).
enabling my iPhone to access the main transit apps of Tokyo (Suica and Pasmo), total fail, incomplete. (I’d later learn they had just changed the systems so foreign phones and credit cards didn’t work. But all the Google search articles didn’t know that, so I continually tried over and over to get my iPhone to be my payment system for transit, as that was my plan.)
All that took about two and a half hours, which is kinda ridiculous, but I had all day to get to my apartment in Tokyo. I had arrived at 4 am, and the transit system didn’t start until five am anyway. That task list above could be accomplished in an hour if I had to, but it would’ve been the most stressful hour of my life. Instead, I leisurely picked off one task at a time, and then took breaks to look around and just be in awe of the humanity rolling through the international airport of a city of 35 million people. The entire world pumping in and out of the ventricles of Tokyo! It was one of the most magnificent sights and experiences of my life, and everybody else was bored and yawning. I felt like we should all be in a circle singing and dancing to Hava Nagila or In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or its Japanese equivalent. Instead, I tried to keep a poker face on and not stare at everyone like a pervert. (I’m lusting for humanity, ma’m, not just you.)
Because my phone couldn’t be used as a payment system for transit, I had to purchase transit some other way. This was not in the plan, and therefore this was not thoroughly over-researched. I asked ChatGPT a few things, verified it on Google, talked to the good folks at the info desk, and made my two reconnaissance trips to the transit kiosks. I was very aware of how pissed everyone became to tourists who couldn’t figure out the screens, and especially furious to the ones who received their tickets or passes and then sat in front of the kiosk to rearrange their entire packing system to accommodate this tiny slip of paper instead of moving to the side to let the next person get access. Assholes!
I was ready. I was ready to not be an asshole.
I stepped into line.
I actually knew which line was correct. (There are multiple kiosks, multiple lines, and even multiple offices that sold transit. It’s complicated.)
I continued to try to read the screens over people’s shoulders as people ordered.
My turn.
I beeline to the Welcome Suica machine.
I know to first look for the “English” button. Done!
And oh, this is now easy, as I’ve already scoped out which slot of five slots accepts cash. (I’m only using cash because I don’t know if my credit card works in Japan yet. It doesn’t even work in California half the time.)
But then it asks the amount I want to put on the Suica card. Pure panic. I hadn’t even thought of that. There are people behind me and they are surely laughing at how dumb I am that I don’t know the conversion rate in my head and I don’t know the price of transit. I pull out a note that says 1,000 yen and that’s a big number so in it goes and I get my card and run away.
Then Google tells me 1,000 yen is seven dollars. Fuck. Surely I can’t get all the way into the heart of Tokyo from here next to the Pacific Ocean for seven dollars!
I don’t know yet that you can add money to these cards (different set of kiosks), so I get back in line and get another Welcome Suica card with 10,000 yen. Now I have $77 in transit money and feel like I own a fleet of limos.
Now it’s time to leave the airport, and to actually get on the monorail. My fifty pound suitcase has a backpack strapped to its handle, with the other pack on my back, and all movement is complicated by that, like the heavy baggage of our post. There are huge signs everywhere for the monorail, but I don’t know if the arrow means turn left immediately, or go fifty yards and then left, or if that’s where you buy tickets for the monorail, so I go back to the info desk and ask like an idiot where the monorail entrance is. The Japanese woman with better English than me points, and it’s pretty obvious.
There are three digital turnstiles, one of which has a little gate system that opens and closes. The other two have no gates, and I don’t know why. I do my wait-watch-listen and see that any turnstile works, and apparently it’s all motion sensors and digital scanning. Some folks (foreigners) put their tickets in and walk through and red lights flash an annoying beep sounds and they stop and go back and wonder stupidly what went wrong yet no one comes to either arrest them or help them. I despise them, yet pray I’m not one of them, for I am just as broken.
I wheel all my earthly belongings for my four month stay up to the turnstile and tap my card as nervously as if I’m touching a woman’s vagina the first time. Obviously all of humanity has had this experience or humans would be extinct, but apparently I’m the only one who hasn’t and it’s super important and yet it’s not and contact is made and I walk through the gate and it’s climactic and anti-climactic all at the same time. I expect a birthday party but keep a poker face to hold in my disappointment and also my insane victory. I fucking got into the Tokyo monorail system!
< Platform 1 · Platform 2 >
What? I can’t even comprehend this choice. I stand and block traffic and stare.
< Platform 1 · Platform 2 >
I can’t remember how I discerned which platform to get onto. I’m sure it’s obvious, but at that point it was a coin flip. I went to platform 2, which felt counterintuitive, but the signs seemed to say choose door number two. The escalators lifted my overweight American body and overstuffed luggage up into the glass cathedral of the Tokyo monorail system. I had left the building, and I was entering Tokyo air: saltwater and pollution and abundant life.
A digital sign on the platform told me I had three minutes until the train arrived. I decided I’d ride it for a while and use my live map location on my phone to see if I was in fact going the right way.
Does it matter where I stand on this platform? Folks were distributed randomly, bored. My heart was pumping. After thousands of micro-decisions in the last few hours, I gave up, and just walked to where four people were standing. Safe enough.
I looked out the end of the glass building that encased the station and the rails, and looked out to the bay which held the Pacific Ocean. Oh my god, this is the other side of the Pacific Ocean!
And here comes the train, rounding in the distance to get me!
“Do you speak English?”
Two hours in Japan, and I’m already startled to hear English spoken to me. A guy my age is up in my face, and he takes my hesitation to assume that I don’t speak English. He asks again, simply, “English?”
“Yeah, man,” I say, to indicate I also speak American.
“Is this the side we’re supposed to be on to get into Tokyo?” he asks me. He points across the tracks to the other platform as counterpoint.
“Dude,” I say, “I’ve been here two hours. I hope so.”
He’s not happy with my answer, and is starting to turn away in frustration. A peculiar American frustration, I’ll later understand.
Then my mind makes a leap. I say, “Yes. This trains takes us to Tokyo.”
He’s doubtful. He gives me the half-turned head of a listening dog.
“This is the one,” I assure him.
He trusts me, his nervous shoulders drop, and walks back to his bags as the train pulls up.
I get in. I heave my bag into the metal safety bin and grab a seat as if I’ve done it a thousand times before. The train is empty, and I grab a seat that feels favorable.
It’s the Tokyo monorail, man. Dude, we can’t go anywhere but Tokyo. It’s all Tokyo from here on out baby.
The monorail both glides and bumps away, like riding the log in the flume ride at Valleyfair in Shakopee Minnesota where I got to take one friend each year for my birthday between ages eight and twelve.
I’m 55 years old and I’ve ridden all sorts of roller coasters in all sorts of amusement parks and gone over 120 mph in Trans Ams and Ducati motorcycles and been in numerous near-miss car crashes and none of it—nothing—compares to the thrill, the sense of peace and awe, the sense of inexorable forwardness into the unknown, the intuition of “you have no idea what you’re rolling into,” that I felt on that completely ordinary and extraordinary monorail.
Most of our change comes unwillingly. For once, I was truly willing and able and desirous. Bring it—platform 1, platform 2—doesn’t matter. Take me wherever I need to go. I have 11,000 yen, whatever that means.
