I arrived in Japan in October 1990 with a newly purchased backpack and a confidence that trip without a plan was going to turn out alright.
At Narita I worried about the cost of getting into Tokyo – a taxi was out of the question – but I took the train rather than the limousine bus. It felt like a sensible compromise. But as I watched the countryside slide past it felt like a first loss of nerve.
Tokyo’s rail system was not confusing in the usual way. Nothing was missing and nothing was improvised. But lines overlapped without merging. Private railways were threaded through JR lines like separate kingdoms. Tickets worked perfectly, except when they didn’t. Turnstiles accepted you or humiliated you by their refusal while the hurried commuter behind watched indignantly.
Everything functioned appositely and it didn’t care I didn’t understand how.
Shinjuku was described as a station. In practice it was a vast, folded city with entrances stacked on entrances and exits that led outside only to refer you back inward. You could be inside Shinjuku and still be nowhere near the Shinjuku you needed. I spent hours trying to find the northern exit for the Tōhoku Shinkansen, surfacing into daylight only to discover I had emerged into the wrong version of the place.
Shinjuku made it possible to be correct and stranded at the same time.
North of Tokyo, things eased. Sendai. Morioka. Cities where stations behaved like stations. I mistook this for friendliness. It was probably just scale.
Finding somewhere to sleep was harder.
The routine repeated itself. I arrived at a station and went straight to the tourism desk, if I arrived early enough for it to still be open. Sometimes they had preprinted sheets — not maps so much as instructions. Which bus to take. Where to stand. The exact fare.
On a paper, written in Japanese, would be a sentence I could not say. Something like:
高松のバス停で降りたいので、バス停に近くなったら教えて下さいませんか。
“I’d like to get off at the Takamatsu bus stop, so could you please let me know when we’re getting close?”
I would hand it to a stranger.
The buses were always full. The driver wore white gloves and an expression that suggested questions had already been asked and answered elsewhere. I paid. I stood where there was room. The system did not punish ignorance; it simply did not respond to it.
Then I waited. Counting stops I couldn’t read. Watching the face of the person whose legibility I had borrowed. Waiting for the nod.
Often there was still a walk. A map whose scale lied just enough to make me doubt myself. Streets without numbers that meant anything to me.
Sometimes, at the end of it, I was told there were no vacancies.
This was said politely, without embarrassment. My tiredness did not count as evidence. I took this at face value and found a hotel.
Later, I learned another method.
In the morning, at the youth hostel, I would persuade a Japanese guy from the tatami room to phone ahead and make a reservation for me. When I arrived later, I could present proof. This worked every time. Doors opened. Forms appeared. Apologies were offered.
Often the place was almost empty.
At the time I thought this was clever. It worked. That was enough.
The refusals stopped. The friction disappeared. I moved through places already interpreted.
Only later did it occur to me that the friction disappeared because somebody else had absorbed it in advance.
The earlier refusals hadn’t been hostility. They had been risk management. I was an unknown quantity entering spaces governed by rules that didn’t announce themselves — toilet slippers, communal baths, agreements you were expected to infer. Saying “full” avoided the need to explain any of this.
There were moments when that distance collapsed.
I’d been to boarding school. Communal baths, steam, the casual exposure of bodies were familiar. The onsen didn’t feel foreign. They felt like something I already knew how to inhabit, without instruction.
Once, staying at a small ryokan in Semboku, I was greeted by an old woman who made no attempt to hide her irritation. I was her only guest. At some point I put my finger straight through one of her paper shōji screens.
She looked at the hole. Then at me.
The screen was patched in several places. I wasn’t the first.
That evening, something shifted. She sat with me and my battered English–Japanese phrasebook, reading aloud from it, trying phrases, laughing, correcting me, mangling my pronunciation in return. The house filled with laughter — not politeness, but the kind that makes time pass quickly.
In the morning she waved me off.
No forms. No reservation. Just an evening that worked because neither of us tried very hard to get it right.
Another time, at a youth hostel, I shared a dorm with an old man. We shared almost no language. We searched through kanji together, pointing, guessing, circling meanings that never quite arrived. He had a car. Eventually he insisted on driving me somewhere.
It turned out to be a farm.
At first I didn’t understand my reaction. Then I recognised it. The layout was familiar. Open fields. Machinery I knew. A Western farm, reproduced in Japan. I walked around politely, nodding, trying to work out what I was meant to take from it.
At the time I was disappointed. I remember thinking I’d wasted his afternoon.
I asked him to drop me at a station. He bowed. He drove away.
Only later did it occur to me what he had been offering. He was showing me my world, translated into his. Trying to meet me where he thought I lived.
What I missed wasn’t the farm. It was the offer embedded in it.
One afternoon in Tokyo, during rush hour, I stood on a subway platform with my backpack. Trains arrived already full, bodies pressed into the carriage with practiced inevitability. The air smelled of aftershave, sweet and fishy. I waited. I had learned by then that waiting could be called respect.
Then I saw what looked like a gap.
I stepped forward. The doors began to close. My body made it inside. The backpack did not. The doors caught, refused, opened again. The train stalled. A small delay rippled outward.
I disentangled myself and backed out.
No one said anything.
Later, I applied to teach English at a Japanese language school. This was less common then. Not yet fully industrialised. I filled out forms. I imagined staying. I imagined learning properly, letting embarrassment accumulate slowly instead of all at once.
I didn’t do it.
I told myself it wasn’t the right time. It’s a useful sentence. It doesn’t require you to stay.
I have spent decades since learning bits of Japanese — enough to hear registers, enough to know how much I don’t know. I went back once. It was pleasant. Familiar in a softened way. I could feel how easily the order that first astonishes you becomes invisible.
For a long time, I told myself what I had learned in Japan was humility. That story was convenient. It allowed admiration to substitute for commitment.
What I see now is simpler. Understanding wasn’t blocked by opacity. It required a longer, duller investment than I was willing to make. To stay long enough to become tedious and to stop being the reference point. To let misunderstanding run both ways.
Japan is not an inscrutable place I failed to penetrate. It is a life I briefly aligned with and then declined. Not dramatically and not tragically, but with the naive confidence of someone who assumes there will be another train.
There wasn’t. And mostly what remains is the sense of a road not taken seriously enough while I was standing on it.
I went somewhere else.
https://thinkinginstructure.substack.com/p/navigating-japan-1990
