town

The Happiest Place in Tokyo hr664

Hidemi WoodsLeave a comment

It was 1983 when the theme park which host is the mouse opened in Japan for the first time outside the U.S. Two years after it opened, I left my hometown and began to live by myself in Tokyo to pursue my career as a musician. My partner was the one that I had a meeting with to join my first band and I had worked with ever since. He also moved to Tokyo and settled in an extremely shabby small 50-year-old wooden apartment. We were going to find  band members in Tokyo together and to start our new band. However, things didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned and we had fretted ourselves. For a change of a glum mood, we decided to visit the theme park for the first time.

In those days, the concept of a theme park hadn’t been pervasive in Japan and amusement parks were just big fairs with common rides for kids. I had no idea what a theme park meant either when I first visited there. Although I hadn’t even dreamed of that, the visit came to have changed my life significantly.

As I stepped in the park without any particular knowledge nor expectation, I was instantly shocked. What spread in front of my eyes was a world that was totally different from the Japanese one outside. All the buildings were pretty and cool as if they had been popped out of picture books or foreign movies. One of the areas duplicated a street of an American remote town which looked so attractive. Other than numerous authentic quality attractions, amazingly professional shows were played everywhere with great dancing and singing from the cast. The true entertainment was there. Also, not a single piece of litter was spotted on the ground. The moment someone dropped one popcorn, a cleaning worker appeared from somewhere and swept it in a flash. Each and every worker was kind and smiling. Even when a small child vomited, they didn’t make a wry face but cleaned with considerate treatment. The park’s number of visitors were not big because it had been only two years since the theme park opened and it hadn’t gotten so popular yet. That made it perfect with no crowd and I imagined that the intended concept of the person who came up with this park’s idea almost truly got materialized. Furthermore, Japanese signature courtesy and earnestness was added to that. The staff were standing straight in front of the attractions without slacking, waving at the passing guests with a smile and a bow. At the restaurant, they served with excellent attitude and speed though there was no custom for a tip. It seemed this was the very place that the world should be and a utopia that wasn’t believed to exist in the real world.

There was one more huge aspect that captured my heart. Since I was a child, I have had difficulty with being with people. Because I didn’t have a friend when I was little, talking to stuffed animals was my habit to relieve loneliness. To my surprise, in this park, man-sized stuffed animals appeared one after another all around and lived there as the residents, waving at the guests or looking at merchandise at the shop or teasing the staff. From up on the stage of the revue, they were singing toward the guests that dreams would come true. The world I had dreamed of did exist there and I became a captive to this magical park.

The day filled with emotion and excitement came to an end and the park’s closing time arrived. I didn’t want to leave. I strongly wished I could stay in this place. With tears in my eyes, I went through the park’s gate into the city of Tokyo where I now got to live and grungy anxiety and frustration engulfed me every day. I took the bus from the park remembering what my mother once told me when I couldn’t sleep. She said that if I waited patiently in my futon, a bus would eventually come to pick me up and take me to the dream world of stuffed animals. I finally understood she had unknowingly meant this bus and this park. Tokyo used to be the dream place for me who was born and raised in a rural part of Japan. But when I got there, Tokyo turned into mere somber reality. Now that I saw an earthly paradise like this theme park, I began to fancy myself living there or in some place that at least looked alike.

Ten years later, I was living in California, speaking English instead of Japanese. I hadn’t even dreamed of that kind of my future on that day when I first visited the theme park. 

Bear Attacks hr636

Hidemi WoodsLeave a comment

A black shape of a bear is drawn on a yellow background with big capital letters of ‘Beware of Bears!’. That is a poster I see everyday out of my apartment window lately. Not just one. It’s on the fence along a stream and at the little bridge over it so that I spot it everywhere sitting at my table. It has multiplied rapidly this year. On a bench at the nearby park, on the public bathroom wall in my neighborhood, at scattered vacant lots, the posters are rampant here and there that I’d never seen before in my town. Those are not just for warning. Those indicate the spots where bear’s foot prints were left or a bear was actually witnessed. From morning till night, patrol cars with loudspeakers drive around blaring out “Bears are spotted! Be careful when going out!” all day long. The car stops on the little bridge beneath my window and sets off firecrackers to scare off bears. Some members of the local hunting association fired blank shots there. It’s said that the reason why bears come down to a residential area from the mountains so often has to do with the climate change that causes a shortage of food for them.
About ten years have passed since I moved in this snowy town enclosed by the mountains. It’s been warmer and snowed less year after year compared to when I began to live here. That has helped make my winter days easier that I used to suffer from claustrophobia by the deep snow coverage.
Added to the climate change that affects my daily life, I also sense my own mind changes. I had feared if a monotonous country life rusted me away when I decided to move in here. It didn’t happen. Rather, the quiet life increased my concentration and contributed more productivity for my lifework than the time when I lived in the metropolitan area. I have a serener mindset than before and it gives me more understanding toward myself and the world I live in.
Recently, people have stayed home and worked remotely in Japan too. They have left big cities and moved to rural areas. More and more people from Tokyo have moved into my small town that I had expected nothing but to become desolate every year. There are many unfamiliar new residents in the apartment building where I live. The building used to look like a ghost house with dark windows, but it has almost no available room now. I had never imagined that would happen mere one year before. The unthinkable things occurred at the unthinkable speed. In this trend, we can’t tell what happens next. In three years, bears might be chasing after me. Not bears but people might start chasing people and killing each other. Or human race might extinct because of viruses. There might be days of a panic, or moments of danger for life. Even so, it could turn to be better. These unprecedented years have shown how much human imagination is limited. I myself have learned that a superficially dire thing can turn out to be a good thing in the end. Besides, I saw unthinkable things happen, so why not unthinkably good ones? I believe they could happen as well. They should.

Loneliness Is My Norm hr635

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The nearest grocery store from my home is a 25-minute walk away. That small local store carried a sale on eggs at one dollar for ten. I walked there with my partner to get them. Since my town is so small and rural, there are usually almost no pedestrians on the streets. Except that cars are passing by sparsely, I hardly see anybody. But on our way back home from the grocery store, I saw a woman standing by a field and watching wild flowers. It was rare to see someone on the street. As I was getting closer, I perceived her looking at me with her face filled with a big smile that was totally familiar to me. I knew her.
She used to be a resident in the apartment building where I live. We often came across and shared some time together at the communal spa in the building. She is much older than I am, but we somehow got along well and chatted heartily every time we saw each other at the spa. About six years ago, she moved out of the apartment to the different one in the same town. I unexpectedly felt so sad because I had regarded her as if part of my family unconsciously since we met and talked almost everyday. However, when I saw her for the last time and she tentatively hinted her suggestion to exchange contact information and invite me to her new place, I just chickened out and dodged a reply. I wavered tremendously but didn’t have courage to step into a new friendship. We parted without even asking each other’s names. The spa had become quiet ever since. Occasionally from nowhere, a thought about how she has been doing came up to my mind while I was taking a bath with no one to chat. I regretted my decision not to be friends with her. I missed her more than I had thought.
And I saw her again after those years by this incredible coincidence. I jumped for joy to have bumped into her like this. Her big smile and loud laughter hadn’t changed a bit and she told me how she had been doing. After we chatted for a while, I sensed the time to say good-bye again was approaching. And I was swallowed by one single thought: Should we exchange contact information this time? I ran through a scenario in my head. If I asked her info here, she would expect me to get in touch later. Then if I got in touch with her, she would invite me to her place. Then if I went to see her, she would expect me to invite her back in my place next time. Then if we found little left to talk about, we would be distant gradually. Then if it broke off, I would regret my contact exchange of today retrospectively. While I was trying to see the future, she also tried to judge my feelings and tentatively brought up a plan to see each other again, like deja vu. The time to decide had come.
I had missed her. I had wanted to be friends with her. I made a wrong decision last time and this could be the second chance falling from the sky. On the other hand, I had too many bitter experiences about friendship and wanted to add no more. I felt harsh loneliness every time I lost friendship. The closer my friend and I were, the harder it was to be estranged. I tend to have high hopes and expect too much for someone I make friends with, that usually leads to painful disappointment when she or he doesn’t meet my expectation. I had had many friends and lost them. For me, getting along well isn’t enough to build friendship. I need to respect someone as a friend. People change. Once I can’t respect my friend any longer, my friendship is over. I also need to be accepted as who I am. That’s why most of my friends left me when I decided to become a musician. I wonder how I could ever start a new friendship as long as I know how I would feel when it ends. Disappointment would be huge this time all the more because I like her. I couldn’t bear the loneliness it would bring.
Since I was a child, I have struggled to escape from loneliness. I had searched for someone to get along, thought I found one, and realized I didn’t. Repeating the cycle had accumulated loneliness. I reached the point to afford no more loneliness long ago. But in the course of my life, I’ve got the solution. I think loneliness may be overestimated and it’s not so bad if you see it from a different perspective. Sometimes loneliness is freedom. Sometimes it’s self-esteem. It works for me to stop looking for the way not to be lonely, but accept to be lonely instead. To fend off loneliness, be lonely already.
I didn’t ask her contact information and neither did she mine after all. We said our good-byes without giving names again. We waved and resumed our ways in opposite directions. Immediately the blame on her crossed my mind that she should have pressed on our contact exchange. If she had cornered me and I had had no choice, I could have told. Why didn’t she simply ask me so that I could answer? No, I reconsidered, it was better as it went. I felt her kindness more than ever not to ask me and walked on with holding a lot of fresh eggs.