Shinjuku

It looked like a multi-coloured version of the squiggle people do when they are trying to get a pen going.

It might have been a wiring diagram for a Toyota Camry had it not been for the words “Subway Map” in the bottom right-hand corner. They were the only words in English: the station and line names were all in Japanese.

I compared it with the subway map which came with my guidebook, but it might as well have been for a different city. Neither seemed to reconcile with the map in the back of the leaflet I had picked up at a station I passed through earlier. It made no sense.

I got off at Shinjuku and went through to the ticket hall to try to find a better map. I remembered then why I had heard of Shinjuku: it is officially the busiest station in the world. Some 3.64 million people pass through it every day, roughly equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles, or the combined populations of Birmingham and Greater Manchester.

They all seemed to have arrived at once. I stood, bewildered, with my guidebook in one hand and my baffling map in the other, looking from one bank of searing neon to the next as busy people in suits knocked me this way and that.

There were fifty-one platforms to choose from, and two-hundred exits to leave by if I decided to bugger that and get a taxi. Somewhere amid the mass of humanity, under the kaleidoscope of neon, behind all the cheerful jingles to announce that a train was arriving or leaving, on one or other of the Yamanote Line, Chūō Main Line, Chūō Rapid Line, Chūō Sōbu Line, Shōnan-Shinjuku Line, Saikyō Line, Odakayu Odawara Line, Keio Line, Keio New Line, Maranouchi Line, Toei Shinjuku Line, or Toei Ōedo Line was the train I needed to take. There was only a 50:1 chance of getting it wrong.

I struggled with a combination of maps and signs, got on a train and counted off the stops. Then – to my astonishment – I was back in Ōimachi, right where I had started two hours before. All of the maps agreed that that was impossible. But there I was.

For a good two days, I tried and failed to understand why all the maps seemed so very different, how two stations could be adjacent on one map and have five or six stations between them on another. I followed signs through stations the size of airports, which took me up through three levels of platforms, out through shopping malls and down the street, round the corner, to a different station entirely. It all remained a mystery.

Then I found out that there are two separate subway networks, the four publicly-owned Toei Lines and the nine privatised Tokyo Metro Lines, and another dozen or so networks of mass-transit railways, some owned by the state, some by private companies, which connect with, run parallel to and operate in much the same way as the subway network but are not technically part of it; then there are a further sixteen suburban lines. There are different maps for different networks.

It all made sense then and, in time, I could use the system without a map and a vacant expression. I thought that I ought to have got a certificate or something.

At rush-hour it hardly matters whether you know where you ought to be going. A Tokyo commuter crowd is like a fast-flowing river. Only the strongest can swim against the tide: the rest are swept along with the current, forced round obstructions and out into the open sea.

If the crowd transfers to the Hibuya Line, then so do you; if it takes Exit A, then you take Exit A as well; and if the crowd stops off at a department store to buy a tie then you need to think quickly what colour would go best with your shirt.

© Richard Senior 2015

Station image: “Rush hour at Shinjuku 02” by Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rush_hour_at_Shinjuku_02.JPG#/media/File:Rush_hour_at_Shinjuku_02.JPG

Tokyo seems never to end. Even from 200 metres up, on the observation deck of the Metropolitan Government Building, all you see stretching out until they blur together are thousands of densely packed office and apartment blocks. Only the nearby National Gardens break the monotony of concrete and glass. Rivers, parks, roads and railways are simply swallowed up.

The city streets are as wide as European motorways. The stations are the size of airports. The crowds expand to fill them. Hurrying salarymen toting briefcases. Bent old ladies with surgical masks and bells on their bags which tinkle like the collars which cats are made to wear to stop them catching birds. Orange-haired teenagers hunched over iPhones as they shuffle down the pavement and into the Metro and onto trains and out at the other end without ever looking up.

When the cherry blossoms come, the crowds descend on the parks and sit in huddles under the trees, laughing and chatting excitedly, or jostle with selfie sticks held at arm’s length. They take the train en masse to Naka-Meguro at the end of the Hibiya Line and clog the streets either side of the canal, stopping for selfies, street snacks, beer or cherry blossom ice cream.

Searing neon fizzes from every surface. Music explodes from animated billboards. It follows you across the street along overhead wires. More of it pierces out of the sides of trucks as they inch through the middle of town.

The noise from Vegas-scale pachinko parlours deafens as you pass by the door. Digital birdsong plays in the stairwells in stations. Elevators and escalators chatter away to you. The station cleaner’s rig plays Fur Elise to warn you that it is approaching from behind. The Yankee Doodle Boy heralds platform announcements; a jingle celebrates a train’s departure.

Yet even in the middle of Tokyo, there are pockets of perfect tranquility. Just a block or two back from Ueno Park, where shrieking couples lark in swan boats and tightly-packed groups share bentos on mats spread underneath the cherry trees, the scale shrinks and the noise is muted, the crowds vanish and the neon never intrudes. The alleys are lined with old wooden shophouses and discrete galleries, and temples and shrines, gnarled pines and ancient cedars.

Two hours to the north in Nikkō, there are no high-rise blocks; no neon, no gratuitous music, no bustling salarymen, no teenagers with orange hair. There are just quiet restaurants and antique shops and a mineral-green river which hurtles over boulders and flows under a humped-back bridge.

In the forests in the hills, there are gilded temples with intricately painted eaves and dragons and grotesques and the original monkeys to see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. It is as beautiful and as peaceful as anywhere I have been in the world.

To the west, deep in the Japanese Alps, the streets of the old town of Takayama are lined with wooden buildings from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries: inns and craft shops and sake breweries. In the early evening, after the day-trippers have left, an old man potters down the street in pyjamas, and a lady kneels outside her house to pull up weeds, and a couple slowly rolls by on bicycles.

It is hard to comprehend how a single nation can be at once so manic and so sedate, so big, so bright, so loud, yet – at the same time – so quiet and calm; how unspoilt heritage can coexist so closely with ruthless modernity. It is almost as if there are two Japans.

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