Letters from Tokyo by Roland Kelts, February - May : "What a Long Strange Spring It’s Been" for The Japan Society of Boston
Letters from Tokyo by Roland Kelts, February - May : What a Long Strange Spring It’s Been
We swallowed an entire season in the latest of my "Letters from Tokyo" series for The Japan Society of Boston, partly because I was away from Tokyo for huge chunks of it. This spring Japan opened its borders and the tourists rushed into Tokyo and Kyoto, PM Kishida survived an attempted assault via pipe (smoke?) bomb--and while Covid eased its grip, roller-coaster climate changes have swung many of us (i.e, me) in and out of summer colds. Let's look back before we fast-forward too far.
The February night I returned to Tokyo from New York felt like spring had landed ahead of me. I shed my jacket in the unusually long taxi line outside Haneda, watched two teenage boys order an Uber and promptly copied them, stepped over the ropes, skipped the line, and settled after five minutes into the backseat of my driver’s minivan, rolling down the windows on both sides.
The weather during my two-week stay in New York had been alternately mild and frigid, but the air was so dry that Tokyo’s subtropical humidity embraced me like a mitten. Body parts that shivered at departure were sweating on arrival.
This couldn’t be February, I thought. But my watch said it was and as soon as I got home I slid open more windows and sat on the balcony, watching the red aircraft warning lights on Shinjuku skyscrapers blink against sleep.
Spring is a transitional season and not my favorite (I'm an autumn guy, soft color and fading light), and this one has felt especially long because I flew to the US twice, to New York and Los Angeles, to be interviewed for doc series on Netflix, the History Channel and PBS. In between I spent a week in Niigata to write about a new international film festival. On the Joetsu Shinkansen we rolled north from the whites of Kanto's Somei Yoshino through the gray snows of Gunma to the Sea of Japan blues and back again--a reminder that Honshu hosts several seasons at once.
The cherry blossoms bloomed earlier than ever. They were out before I flew to LA and after I flew back, prompting relentless sakura pics on social media taken from every angle at every hour through whatever filter fit the whim. Hanami revelers carpeted Yoyogi Park, and the blossoms above them were tenacious, clinging to limbs through breezy rains as if they, too, needed a post-Covid coming-out and meant to milk every minute of it.
But flowers were not the only blossoms in town. For the first time in more than two years, overseas tourists sprouted from every curb and corner, brandishing smartphones to keep the unknown at bay. In March, newspapers recorded Japan’s highest “post-Covid” surge in visitors, rising to over 65% of 2019’s peak, though quite when the virus had gone passé and postal remains unclear. Covid was still happening in March, at least by all official measures, and in Tokyo we wore masks and sanitized and tried to follow the government’s soft-core 2020 advisory to avoid the “Three Cs”—closed spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings.
One of the clerks at one of my local Lawson convenience stores—there are two roughly four-minutes’ walk apart, but only one has the tall, paunchy, garrulous clerk—complimented me on my mask-wearing as I purchased a tub of yogurt. I’d been in LA for just a couple of weeks and at first I thought he’d forgotten who I was and mistook me for a tourist. Then he added that masks were so troublesome, weren’t they? And they made it hard to breathe, didn’t they? And it was very good of us to continue wearing and bearing them, wasn’t it? And I nodded, relieved.
Relief overwhelms me when I return to Japan. It wasn’t always so. For years “returning” meant going back to New York, arriving home from my overseas life. If I had a window seat and caught the jewel of Manhattan’s skyline upon descent, I felt a familiar surge in my chest, a tightening of selfhood and resolve: My home language, my sense of space and energy revived, my food smells, street-stench and signage. Ah.
Somewhere along the way, and at some point in time (do we ever know when, exactly, things really change?) overseas became over there, the destination when my flights soared Eastward, to North America.
That’s the journey I now need to gird for, rethinking my behavior (am I speaking too quietly, apologizing too often, bowing instead of shaking your hand?), diet (what to do with these gargantuan, overstuffed sandwiches?), gait (strut and sway through those wide spaces, don’t stiffen like a pencil-geek), and expectations—this last being the hardest adjustment to make. From vending machines to trains, planes, escalators and autos, most things work most of the time in Japan. When they don’t, someone apologizes profusely.
Deep breaths, count to 10, 20, 57. I learn and relearn to curb my expectations in the US so I won’t grow exasperated, or get shot. (Those signs at Nordstrom saying no guns allowed! Necessary, I guess, but, oh.) A phrase I was raised with, “the far east,” so alien and exotic, now points to a land east of where I live, across the Pacific, a country where I was raised but no longer reside.
Tokyo has seen its own share of sadness and ailments this spring. March marked the 12th anniversary of the Tohoku triple disasters of earthquake, tsunami and meltdown. Each year the horror is revisited but never quite reckoned with, and the tally of the dead and the missing, now at 22,215, ticks up silently. Sparse anti-nuclear demonstrations were punctuated on March 28 by the death of pioneering composer/musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, also a committed anti-nuclear and environmental activist. And less than a year after the shooting murder of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a 24 year-old man tossed a pipe bomb at sitting PM Fumio Kishida during a campaign event in Wakayama, missing his target by barely 10 feet.
One week in April, a sudden spike in the mercury and humidity caused a record number of heat stroke cases at Tokyo clinics. The following week got so chilly that a relatively new diagnosis, “spring fatigue,” was ascribed to patients complaining of muscle aches, sleeplessness, appetite loss and, well, the overall fatigue stemming from drastic climate swings. (One news show demonstrated the proper way of folding a few sweaters hastily retrieved from winter storage amid this spring’s temperamental temperatures.)
Not to be outdone, May brought us gogatsu-byou, or “the May blues,” another kind of seasonal blight brought on by the end of the Golden Week spring holidays (on May 8 this year) and feeling overwhelmed by work, school, family or other obligations, or just the end of spring and start of summer, or just the ongoing month of May itself, which ambles for 31 lengthening days.
Therapy doesn’t have the cure-all prestige in Japan that it carries for many in the US, so these afflictions are blamed on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything our bodies do that we don’t think about. Doctors prescribe rest, changes in diet, exercise, sometimes medication.
But nerves of every kind all across Tokyo were shaken by a cause for which there is no cure. A little after 4 a.m. on May 11 (another 11!), a 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck Chiba, slightly east of Tokyo. Smartphone emergency alerts sounded across the city, waking some 30 million or more with an urgent reminder of our precarity in this most functional metropolis. It’s mere coincidence, of course, but as I write I’m already half-packed for my next flight to New York.
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