Nocturnal Creatures: A Tour of Shinjuku
The train from Narita International Airport seems desolate at this hour but it’s not as bleak as the darkness outside. It swallows the trees and parks of the city, making it forlorn, and is punctuated only by the odd love hotel of Chiba and the fake constellations of flashing red lights atop the tallest buildings warning helicopter and aeroplane pilots of their approaching doom.
The urban sprawl would almost be intimidating were it not for the darkness. Tokyo Metropolis is divided into twenty-three self-governing ‘special wards’, or ku, making up a sizable chunk of the population of the Greater Tokyo Area, the largest in the world with 38 million people calling it home. Think of Tokyo as a patchwork quilt: the special wards are the individual patches; the individual districts and neighbourhoods, which comprise these special wards, are the fibres. This neat metaphor is made redundant, however, when you take into account the other cities that combine with these special wards of Tokyo to make up the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. It’s confusing but hey, it takes a lot of red tape to govern for 38 million people, to put out the fires, to make the garbage disappear and the trains run on time.
The Tokyo train network, famous for its punctuality and cleanliness, makes this behemoth of a city work. The train I’m on is speeding towards my destination of Shinjuku Station, one of the busiest transport hubs in the world, linking the special ward of Shinjuku-ku with neighbouring wards, districts, neighbourhoods and cities of the Greater Tokyo Area.
Shinjuku finds itself on solid ground. After the Great Kanto Earthquake had devastated the central district of Tokyo in 1923, the city’s remaining populace sprawled to the west where the damage was less severe. Thanks to seismically-sound soil, stations on the western edge of Tokyo took on the appearance of new central urban hubs.
The station is devoid of a signature scent—no acrid stench of urine, offensive pong of body odour or weighty stink of rubbish—the vacuum instead filled by a smell of nothingness. Shinjuku Station seems like it should be a clusterfuck of people coming and going. The heaving mass, a cross-section of Tokyoites, young and old, the hard working and the hardly working, never appear lost. They navigate the tiled labyrinths of underground tunnels and shops, the hundreds of exits and dozens of platforms with the ease and swiftness of homing pigeons, making a system of roughly 3.5 million commuters per day work.
As I stand at the station, trying to figure out where I need to go and which exit is best taken, I realise that thinking of these people as anything but a collection of tribes seems impossible. There are the vacant, tired expressions of office workers after a long day slaving for the man. Or the young, hip things waiting for their friends, equal parts painfully cool and painfully self-conscious. Trying to imagine the lives of these people on an individual human scale seems impossible, given they flit into my life as quickly as they do out of it.
As ‘Every Breath You Take’, the voyeuristic classic by the Police, plays through overhead speakers I trudge through the station with luggage in tow. Shinjuku Station has always been a transport hub, allowing Tokyoites to get from point-A to point-B with a minimum of fuss. The station, however, also acts as a point of demarcation, a man-made, physical barrier separating west and east Shinjuku, business and pleasure, the straight-laced and the seedy.
***
It’s Saturday night in Golden Gai, a small pocket of lean-tos located on the east of Shinjuku Station, and I’m sitting in a small bar getting the third-degree from the law. The questions come thick and fast in conversational English: What are you doing in Tokyo? Where were you today? How long are you here for and when do you go back to your country? Is this your first time in the Golden Gai area? How old are you and what do you do for a living? Where were you previously in Japan and where have you been before? Are you in Japan for business or leisure? Do you speak Japanese? Are you married? Do you like sushi? I answer these questions as concisely and clearly as I can, noticing the strange effect talking to Japanese people has on my speech patterns. I sound like a lazy English phrasebook or a robot that carefully chooses his words, searching for synonyms that are easily grasped, stripping the quizzical Australian affirmative ‘No worries’ from my lexicon—a misnomer rarely understood anywhere else in the world—while concealing insecurities at my inability to grasp and speak Japanese.
The walls behind the wooden bar are painted a bright pink that’s hard to miss, even in the murky, smoky light. Bottles of Yamazaki and Nikka Whisky fill out the bar’s shelves. The conversation is mediated by a small woman behind the bar whose English is very good. I find myself seated among three men: two lawyers and a psychiatrist. The first lawyer, Kenji, a 26-year-old with a neat haircut, kneels on his chair at the end of the bar like an excited kid who can’t sit still. His English is strong and I rely on him to translate a lot of what’s misunderstood. The second lawyer, Toshi, 28, has scraggy hair and large possum-like eyes that appear on the brink of falling out of his head. Sitting immediately to my right, every time he goes to light a cigarette he steals the occasional glimpse of me with a strange smile that suggests awe, but definitely isn’t. To my left, and rounding out the triumvirate, is the 54-year-old unmarried psychiatrist, wearing a neat shirt, neater flip-up sunglasses and a somewhat disconsolate look on his face.
While none of the men work or live in Shinjuku, they all seem familiar with not only the area but also each other, bonding through time spent in bars just like this one, prising valuable alone time from the jobs, companies and bosses that, at times, seem suffocating. This time to themselves is at a premium, particularly for the lawyers. Kenji, whose English is the strongest and was apparently learnt during a two-week course at Cambridge University, states rather matter-of-factly his typical workday is eighteen hours, starting at 9AM and not clocking off until 3AM. Toshi confirms this statement; his days are slightly less strenuous with the typical workday being fifteen hours. Dumbfounded, I look to a third party to verify these claims. It's true, says the lady behind the bar. According to her this is an accurate reflection of the vast majority of hard-working Tokyoites.
A little over a kilometre from where I sit is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, west of Shinjuku Station, which houses the Tokyo Olympic Committee headquarters. Walk around the city, and indeed Shinjuku, and you’ll see construction workers flogging themselves. They wear protective clothing that make them look more like men from outer space than your stock-standard ditch-diggers, their glowing wands and fluorescent helmets noticeable at all hours. They work feverishly in anticipation for the rush that will come with the Olympics and Paralympics in 2020. They’re building new hotels to cater for a swell in numbers or updating infrastructure around transport hubs like Shinjuku and Shibuya stations.
Elsewhere salarymen with looks of consternation on their faces rush to and from one of the many skyscrapers dotting the West Shinjuku skyline. They’re in the midst of trying to figure out how to make a country grow and stimulate an economy, a seemingly impossible task when you consider Japan has been in recession five times in the last decade, due largely to the country’s shrinking population and its birth rates being among the lowest in the world. Despite all this, if Tokyo was a country it would have the fifteenth largest economy in the world. According to CityLab, that’s a GDP of $1.6 trillion, roughly the same as countries like Spain and Canada. Surely enough for people to live happy and comfortable lives.
But there’s still something unsettling about fifteen-hour—let alone eighteen-hour—workdays, hours that seem like the word karoshi, or ‘death from overwork’, is the very definition of. Even at their young age, I can’t help but feel sorry for them, trapped in jobs that Kenji, when asked whether he enjoys his work, responds with an emphatic ‘No’. Stuck in jobs that not only require these long hours, but by a culture where it is expected of them.
Kenji explains that it was the role of his parents to place him in a situation to succeed. They paid all his education costs in order for him to attend the best university possible, which inturn guaranteed him a greater chance of gaining employment in a corporate law firm, or as he calls it ‘white collar law’. Likewise, it is expected that he will pay all the education bills when it comes time for him and his wife to have kids of their own. He strikes me as a man of ambition, driven by status and, as he puts it, ‘Money, money, money’. But Kenji’s also a man bereft of choices. This lack of choice is why Tokyo streets are sparkling clean first thing in the morning, why the trains run on time and why the city has a GDP of $1.6 trillion: Tokyoites just do; they don’t whinge, they don’t sulk. If they have a job, they do it to the best of their ability. That’s their raison d’être. It’s not an expectation coming from their boss or their company, but from their culture and from their family.
Indeed this trait of not whinging, of stoicism, is not isolated to Tokyo. It extends beyond the boundaries of the metropolis to the rest of Japan. Gaman, translated to mean anything from ‘enduring the unbearable with patience’ to ‘suffering in silence’, or simply ‘perseverance’ or ‘endurance’, depending on who’s translating, is born from the country’s complex history, social hierarchy and lay where familial and cultural expectations intersect. This stoicism is the very same characteristic that has informed the Japanese psyche, allowing a country to rebuild from a history of nuclear catastrophe, of tsunamis and earthquakes—from the Great Kanto to the Great East Japan—each event of devastating proportions.
A by-product of this intense stoicism, however, is a brittleness that manifests in an abnormally high suicide rate for Japan, for so long seen by the public as a social issue and not a health problem. For every Kenji toughing out an eighteen-hour workday, or any other ungodly equivalent, there are those crushed under the weight of expectations of family and of country. This weight of gaman so heavy it leads an individual to think that, ironically, he has no other recourse than to pull the mortal pin, so to speak, in the ultimate act of will. While gaman produces a collective strength in the culture, it can and does have the opposite effect: an undeniable fragility.
Toshi and the psychiatrist, after a couple more drinks, stand and bid farewell to Kenji and me. It’s around midnight. The night is young and possums are nocturnal, creatures of the night. The two men, Kenji says, are off to get women and pick-up sushi. Or was this the other way around? And so they walked off into the dankly lit, narrow alleys of Golden Gai. I sit back down to my beer and, seeing an opportunity, ask the corporate lawyer a professional question.
I had noticed a number of West African touts soliciting ‘their’ clubs to tourists in the Kabukicho neighbourhood, east of Shinjuku Station. The last time I was in Shinjuku had been eighteen months previous during a cold January in 2016 and, while there had been touts in the area, the number seems to have grown exponentially. This appeared strange given Japan’s strict immigration restrictions, which were backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, even with Japan’s labour shortage. Who did they work for or were they ‘their’ businesses? Why are there so many West Africans in Tokyo?
Kenji, whose skin blemished and reddened with every sip of beer, looked at me earnestly. He carefully thinks about how best to translate what he was about to say in language I could readily understand. ‘Shinjuku, Kabukicho,’ says Kenji. He pauses for effect. ‘Chaos!’
And it was all he needed to say. A presumption that the word ‘chaos’ was in fact the word he’d deliberately selected from any number of other words readily available in his adequate vocabulary was founded in Kenji’s chuckling to himself. ‘Chaos’ gives a person an impression of lawlessness, of crime and of impropriety. To think that there is a place where the law doesn’t apply, in one of the safest cities in the world, which also happens to be its most populated, is disconcerting. But everything is relative in Tokyo. Tokyo’s chaos is New York City’s minor disruption or Paris’s disorganised apathy.
I finish my beer and note the time: 2AM. Time for me to leave. Kenji nods in agreement, he says should be getting home to his wife. The darkness of night calls from beyond the small door. We take a left, heading towards the void, Kabukicho. As we walk and talk in the busy Tokyo night, an African man approaches us, directing his attention to me and speaking only in English. He claims ‘his’ club has the finest women in Tokyo. For all the man cares my Japanese friend doesn’t exist and is just another face in the crowd.
***
When they approach with their cheesy grins, it’s hard not to smile back. And travelling alone, they approach. A lot. They’re hustlers trying to make a living, just like Jeff from Nigeria. He canters towards me with an understated self-confidence. As with the others that have approached me on this trip, they see me smiling, trying hard not to laugh at their over-zealous sales tactics, and mistake it as a sign of welcoming, of friendliness. There’s nothing physically imposing about Jeff; he’s of average height, standing by himself, dressed just like your old man and, with a name like ‘Jeff’, could well be.
A stone’s throw from Yasukuni-dori in Shinjuku, Jeff and I find ourselves on the precipice of Kabukicho. Tourists around the world associate Yasukuni-dori and its resplendent neon glow with ‘modern’ Tokyo but most would know the area of Kabukicho by the Robot Restaurant, a homing beacon for tourists. The Robot Restaurant is an establishment that proffers crazy shit for the sake of just that. It’s what foreigners have come to expect from the Japanese and what the Japanese think is expected of them, a real chicken and egg dilemma. The restaurant caters to what westerners want in a holiday—passivity—while unintentionally reducing modern Tokyo and the centuries of history preceding it to the metonym of ‘weird’. Meanwhile, the restaurant’s neighbourhood of Kabukicho has its own sordid history which long pre-dates tacky cabaret shows.
‘As far as entertainment districts went, in 1999 nothing beat Kabukicho for pure sleaze,’ writes Jake Adelstein in his book, Tokyo Vice, which recounts his time working as a journalist with the Yomiuri Shimbun as part of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club. ‘Drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery, rip-off bars, dating clubs, massage parlours, S-and-M parlours,’ Adelstein continues with a list both well-researched and expansively inclusive, ‘pornography shops and porn producers … more than a hundred different yakuza factions, the Chinese mafia …’
The area has indeed been the largest red-light district in Tokyo since adult businesses began setting up shop in the mid-eighties after the New Entertainment Business Act took effect. In 2003, under Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, the writer turned controversial far-right politician (and childhood friend of famous Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima), police began to crackdown in Kabukicho, making a concerted effort to clean up the area. They targeted undocumented foreigners, sex shops employing illegal foreign workers and crime groups.
More than a decade later and Kabukicho is still pretty shady. The yakuza are still present. So too West Africans like Jeff, continuing to make a living pedalling a sterilised level of seediness, the area filled with the uncomfortable vestiges of vice: striptease bars, hostess clubs and brothel fronts. Even after Ishihara’s attempted crackdown, Kabukicho still makes a person feel, rather ironically, like a protagonist in one of his friend’s novels: a perverse voyeur looking through a peep hole, not wanting to look but, at the same time, unable to look away. This type of voyeurism is Jeff’s meal ticket, selling ‘his’ strip club to anyone patient enough to listen. But he’s different to the other West African touts of Kabukicho, the resident owls of Shinjuku, invisible during the day, coming out at night when their sensitive eyes can pick a target from a hundred metres out. He’s softly spoken but speaks with a restrained authority, assurance and a refreshing openness on most topics.
According to Jeff, the reason there is so many West Africans in Tokyo is due to 9/11. He claims where most would have been living in the United States pre-2001, they’ve since found their options restricted and Jeff and his West African friends had to trade their American dream for the Japanese equivalent. This is taken at face value, but a check of the American Immigration Council website shows the number of West African immigrants to the United States actually doubled between 2000 and 2010 with Nigeria immigrants having the highest number among West African nations. Jeff, it seems, had unknowingly missed his chance having lived in Tokyo for the last fifteen years.
He found himself in an even more vulnerable position; as a graduate of Business Economics at a Nigerian university, chances for employment in his home country were next-to-nil given his minority tribe, he claims, having little power in Nigeria; hence, Jeff selling the promises of perversity to tourists on the streets of Tokyo. Which is, after all, the only reason he is speaking to me. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Jeff’s gotta eat.
Stating my occupation as a writer and my interest in the West Africans of Kabukicho, Jeff’s eyes light up. Here was his chance to introduce a sales hook. ‘You can’t just scratch at the surfaces,’ says Jeff. ‘You have to be objective and say, “We do not want to rip all people off.”’ With that statement he invites me to ‘his’ club. He says to follow him, claiming that’s what writers for publications like The New York Times and The Economist would do, those bearers of the highest standards of journalistic probity.
When Jeff says ‘We do not want to rip all people off,’ he is referring to reports of clubs illegally overcharging patrons. A quick Google search of ‘drugged kabukicho’, coughs up some pretty lurid results. It gives a person an idea of his or her chances of having a good time, even with someone as seemingly trustworthy as Jeff. Nightmare stories of druggings and scams litter forums and comment sections of websites.
A report in The Japan Times from 2015 states that with Kabukicho attracting an increase in tourists, the police, the local proprietors association and the Shinjuku Ward office were trying to shed the ‘sleazy image’, especially with the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. The area has even gone as far as to play public service announcements over the streets’ PA systems in English, Chinese and Japanese, warning of the touts, how their numbers have recently increased and how they will eventually rip you off. It’s a polite and to the point announcement that never explicitly states what the touts are selling, instead left to the listener’s inference.
Questioning the pros and cons in my head, even going as far as to ask myself ‘What would Vollmann do?’ I err on the side of caution and politely decline. Jeff seems disappointed but cool with my decision. Ultimately I’m scared off by the public announcements, the history of tourist scams and my lack of commissioning from a major news outlet. It’s also hard not to notice the inverse relationship between touts and police officers: an increase in cops generally equals a decrease in touts, suggesting some level of impropriety.
But despite the warnings made in a cacophony of languages, despite the horror stories of druggings and credit card scams and despite the apparent illegality of the operations, the existence of the West Africans cannot be questioned. They’re body and flesh trading in body and flesh. They’re calm and stationary markers operating on the corners of Kabukicho’s streets, where an obvious market come to meet with Kenji’s chaos theory. They’re human beings with very human lives, human choices and human mistakes. They’re present, whether tourists and locals like it or not. Reducing these people to a bug-like species, just as long-term resident Gregory Clark had done when he wrote his story on the touts of Roppongi for The Japan Times in 2014, with rhetoric like ‘infest the area’ and ‘arrogant contempt for civilised behaviour’, serves little purpose.
‘Very bad,’ says Jeff, replying to a question of his experience with racism in Japan. ‘You would be fine. You are white.’ I’m torn at hearing this, knowing that Jeff—harmless, intelligent and well-spoken Jeff—makes a living by selling a potentially exploited product, while trying to do it in a city where he claims he’s a second class citizen, if a citizen at all.
At first glance Japan appears to be a homogeneous society, a picture of uniformity, but even at the turn of the century Shinjuku—and in particular Kabukicho—was a mix of different cultures. ‘[It had] a population of workers more ethnically diverse than anywhere else in Japan,’ writes Adelstein on Kabukicho. ‘It was like a foreign country in the middle of Tokyo.’ Indeed, these different cultures can be seen while walking around Kabukicho, but when you consider Japan had a net immigration rate of practically nought through this time, culminating in the country taking just twenty-eight refugees in 2016, it seems illogical. With Japan’s class system as old as the country itself, these cultural stratifications can quickly lead to discrimination and prejudice—just as they do anywhere else in the world—occurring against ethnic and social minorities and, rather ironically, against the very product Jeff is selling: women. Meanwhile the country continues its tenuous balancing act between deep-seated tradition and another cultural import, consumerist modernity, where most things can be purchased.
As I’m readying myself to leave Jeff, I ask him how many languages he can speak. He modestly states that he speaks three languages: English, his native tribal language and Japanese. Mentioning that he seems far too smart to be doing this type of work, he doesn’t respond straight away. Instead Jeff looks off into neon glow of the night, staring across the Shinjuku street as though all his missed opportunities, bad choices and even worse decisions are on the other side staring back.
‘That’s Africa,’ says Jeff. I leave him, a picture of alienation in a city of isolation, teetering carefully over a crack, one that divides tradition and modernity.
***
Since I first visited Tokyo as a twenty-one-year-old in 2008, the city has continued to evolve and change. It’s a dynamic, living and breathing being. In that time the number of overseas tourist to Japan has tripled, bringing with them lots of cash. The western faces of celebrity endorsements have changed, too, a fight to the death for relevancy—from Tommy Lee Jones flogging me coffee in 2008 to Miranda Kerr, in 2017, giving me the come hither eyes as she tries her best to sell me miso.
As I leave my hotel in Shinjuku I can hear the soundtrack to this trip play over the street’s PA system: ‘If you go with him,’ says Ted, apparently a local comedian, ‘you will be charged at an illegally high rate.’ It’s like a warning that would ring out in an after school special, supplanting potential fears of the stranger’s panel-van with the cheap tricks of the conman. It’s a pleasant summer evening in Tokyo. I walk past busy izakayas crammed with people, past pachinko parlours sporadically filled with isolated figures, past shops selling sneakers and cameras stores, making my way to a Starbucks, the very same that would have Mishima turning in his grave, were he not ash in an urn.
‘It’s amazing how they merge old and new together,’ said every person you know who has been to Japan. This statement is an emphatic declaration, either word-for-word or said as some derivative, but the sentence will always hold both the adjectives ‘new’ and ‘old’. While this is only a partial truth of Tokyo, and Shinjuku in particular, this fails to go beyond the stale clichés and the city’s Facebook likability to the heart of the city’s complexities.
While the novelties of the city have dissipated—the vending machines, the convenience stores, the order, the twee and the kitsch—my love for Tokyo has never waned, a city of isolation and detachment, where 38 million people live in relative harmony. I take a seat outside the Starbucks knowing in the relative quiet of a Shinjuku street, as Tokyoites and tourists alike stream past, that there is a pocket of chaos. It can be found and you don’t have to go looking for it.