I was born to believe / the change of leaves could mean anything, love
One small regret about moving to Tokyo is that I never spent time in Osaka while I still lived out west. I have been in Osaka for a week, and while I would not move here, I would very happily return for another week to immerse myself in the city.
If we're talking about urban cities, Osaka is to Kansai as Tokyo is to Kanto. It is not beautiful and as straightforwardly charming with the way Kyoto is. There are too many goddamn drugstores. It is even more nakedly consumerist than Tokyo in many ways, if only by the sheer willingness to cater to tourists and their wallets. Dotonbori is a triumph of capitalism. The subway is not as station-dense as Tokyo, and changing from one subway line to the other can have you walking up to 500 meters at a time, which is why I've been averaging around 15km a day here. Try switching from the Midosuji to the Yotsubashi line at Namba Station and you'll see what I mean.
Of course, there is much to love here. (One is freer, I think, to criticise beloved places.) Osaka has some truly gorgeous green spaces, like the area around Chasuyama Hill in Tennoji Park, where you can walk through in mid-morning sunlight and eavesdrop on old people with the thickest Osakan accents you'll ever hear. Takoyaki sounds overrated until you eat molten hot balls at some of the city's best stalls, in which case there's no going back - not to Gindaco or anywhere else. Unlike Tokyo, which has fewer kissaten that feel too precious at times, there's a delightful preponderance of kissaten in this city. Depending on what part of town you're in, a stroll around just a few blocks can give you glimpses into dozens of weathered-looking coffeehouses. Some have Totoro toys outside, some with well-dressed gents hovering around a shogi board, middle-aged patrons with coffee and a newspaper or paperback book. Newspapers! What wonderful relics we have here.
A: You don't realise how much you need your memories to navigate the world - from a conversation with Athena
Back in 2013 when I was an exchange student, I met my friend T for the first time through Couchsurfing. We walked around Shinsekai, once thought of by locals as one of Osaka's 'seediest, most dangerous neighbourhoods.' Anyone who has lived outside of Japan will have a good cackle at that. It isn't now. But at the time, what it did have was magnetic, rough, grubby charm in spades.
Temporal distance and nostalgia are speaking now. Without digging back into any photos I've taken (buried in a hard drive somewhere), Shinsekai seemed much larger and more exciting in those days. I remember a tiny shop in Jan Jan Arcade stacked high with dusty antiques and records, an old man with drawings of his cats. (And yet I doubt my own memory of this.) He has vanished. The sundry shops selling tea and snacks seem to have disappeared. There were certainly more shops stocking eccentric clothing - and I don't mean the jerseys and jackets they still sell, but clothes you would see obasan wearing, like obnoxious leopard and tiger print shirts, loud neon-vomit stockings. You'd also see them walking around the area. Even the fashion seems more subdued now.
You will still find arcades full of games from yesteryear, capsule machines dispensing erotic surprises, a couple of kissaten serving coffee and lurid ice cream floats. The pink film cinemas are still there, and so is the barber with yellow towels hanging outside the door. Thekushikatsu restaurants are here, but some have morphed into large chains, and even the small ones have photo menus in English, Chinese, and Korean. If you are visiting for the first time it may seem colourful and charming. Perhaps the streets were always this clean and sanitary, and the veneer of grime is only in my memory. But Tsutenkaku Tower did not have Hitachi-sponsored messages of INSPIRE THE NEXT in turquoise neon, visible from across the city, nor was there a massive fuck-off 8%-tax-discount drugstore at its foot, an unfriendly fluorescent presence where the streets are otherwise filled with warm yellow lights in the evening. This is to say nothing of nearby Tobita Shinchi, the only place in Japan where I ever felt a sense of unease simply walking around there, and which is now apparently a place for tourists to gawk at the sex workers.
Here is a well-worn phrase, misattributed frequently to Heraclitus: change is the only constant. Do you ever feel the whirligig of this age, the ground shifting beneath your feet (sometimes literally here in Japan, okay), the sense that everything is hurtling forward into a million nebulous futures where you are becoming irrelevant? One of the most memorable news items for me this year: anecdotes of elderly people in China being unable to pay in cash, because mobile payments are becoming the norm. Perhaps if I had not waited five years to revisit Shinsekai, the changes wouldn't have been as noticeable.
A: We hate the present that buries our memories, perhaps because it feels like we are being erased. And I guess that's nostalgia. - from a conversation with Athena
In late October I met someone from across the world. My first impression of him was that he shrugged frequently. (What do you call an indifferent carpet? A shrug!) I rarely shrug. I thought about why and tentatively think it may have to do with the act as a physical manifestation of literally letting things go. To let something be. To accept the world for what it is. A physiotherapist told me back in June that I am an intense, disconnected person. The body is the mind is the soul: as New Age as it sounds, the brain is the mind is where all the traumas reside, the shoulders are where tensions build their home. I find it very, very difficult to let certain things go. Am I okay with being erased, being forgotten, becoming irrelevant? I'm still figuring this out.
Walking around Shinsekai this week, I felt - un poco bereft. A wistfulness for a more distant past I didn't know that's already slipped away from the present anyway, and continues to elude any attempt at description. Change is the only constant. The truth is terrible: describing is destroying, said Olga Tokarczuk about guidebooks. Maybe tourism really is the culprit behind the shuttering of tiny shops and opening of garish chains here, maybe it is the inevitable march of gentrification and consumerism. So you take out the camera and click the shutter like everyone else. You document, you record, you eat some kushikatsu. You wonder whether people are disappointed when they come here.
It was evening when I first returned, a recent memory of rain shimmering in the air and on the pavement. Down some darker, narrower street you'll still find sake bars with yellowing magazine features pasted on the glass doors, a few lanterns glowing here and there. There was a tiny karaoke restaurant with its door left open into the night. It began drizzling. I heard a lady warbling something sentimental into a microphone, singing the lyrics half a second too late for the music.
FLORY'S VENTURES (STUFF I'M UP TO)
ESSAY TIME Earlier this month, I ate at a fairly well-known sushi restaurant in Tokyo. I heard and experienced unexpected things, which spawned an essay on fine dining expectations and confrontations with humans: What Do We Expect From Chefs? Reflections on Sushi Dining in Tokyo
EAT WITH ME I am mostly scribbling in journals but sometimes do eating and walking tours in Tokyo - so here's where you send your Japan-bound friends.
SETOUCHI COMINCA STAYS I was involved in a copywriting project earlier this year that sent me down to Ehime along with a few creative folks. They've won an award for the website design! I only contributed 90% of the words, but it's was incredible to see it come to fruition. I hope the words sell you on Uchiko as much as the visuals do.
JAPAN TRAVEL CONSULTING This is exactly like it sounds. Need to ask me burning questions about interesting places, rail travel, or what to include in your holiday? Ask for me (or one of the other excellent folks) at Japan Travel Consulting.
Send to a loved one? In the age of tweets and likes and instant gratification, this letter is hardly any of those things - but if you find yourself enjoying this missive, please consider forwarding this to a friend, a lover, a fellow reader. It's grand to know you're reading this. Thank you for your time <3
In May I quit a full-time job I held for the last three years to write freelance, with some tour guiding and very occasional consultation on the side to supplement this. It isn't the easiest - I feel overwhelmed most days - but, as someone asked me yesterday, would you really rather be doing marketing in an office instead? And to be able to answer with a vehement no - is the definition of being being very, very fortunate. I have been writing for over half my life but it still feels like I am just starting, especially when it comes to publication. How long steady work will last, I don't know - but all that can be done is to barrel forward into the next year, typing and kicking and screaming.
It has been a very full year. I've read dozens of great books, some crap books, made new friends, mostly kept the old ones, fallen for a few ill-chosen people, had my faith in humanity restored briefly by an all-too-brief autumn affair. Not all of it has been good. Some of it has been positively wretched, and I have not really grown a thicker skin or learned to cry less (if anything, I have shed tears on the regular over too many people.) But as the sum of days gone by, I think I would not trade the last few months for anything else.
The other thing I feel grateful (and excited, let's be real) for is that there are over 100 of you reading this! I began this newsletter four months ago to keep myself accountable to personal writing, and as a way to keep in touch with all of you. It is quite literally the one constant I have in the mountain of personal projects that have slid to the wayside. So far I'm managing, and I hope that you continue to enjoy these monthly letters in your inbox.
良いお年を!See you in 2019.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING
Look East, Look to the Future (Granta)
On Writerly Jealousy (The Paris Review)
I Love America. That's Why I Have to Tell the Truth About It (Time)
Why Technology Favours Tyranny (The Atlantic)
A FEW THINGS I'VE WRITTEN