Lost and Found in Japan

Today I left my notebook on the Tobu line train to Ota. I was reviewing notes on the two-hour ride, and I had stuffed the notebook into a pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. The notebook had essential information in it, including all the interviews I had conducted since arriving to Japan two weeks ago. Throughout my day of reporting in Ota, I kept having to borrow my interpreter’s notebook, and by the end of the day, I was completely depressed with the thought of having to listen to hours of tape that I had meticulously transcribed over weeks of interviews. When we got to the Ota station, my interpreter, Chiaki, took me to the Stationmaster’s office. That’s where I met Mr. Aiba. Aiba-san was in his 50s, tall, thin, graying hair, glasses, and, like most Japanese in his position, incredibly polite. He wore a blue Tobu Line uniform with a green band around his arm with ‘security’ written on it in Japanese. Aiba-san listened intently to Chiaki’s every word describing the notebook, where I left it, and how important it was to me. He asked follow-up questions: “What are the approximate dimensions of the notebook? Is your name on the notebook?” and so on. As Chiaki answered, he took notes. When he was finished, he offered us a seat, briskly walked to his desk, and picked up the phone. He called other stations, he called cleaning companies, and he consulted timetables for the Tobu train line. In between calls, he updated us: “The train you were on has made three round trips from Tokyo to Akagi today. Cleaning crews in many cities have cleaned the train several times.” Aiba-san briefly left the room while he waited to hear from cleaning crews. He found time to serve us tea. A minute later, he received a call from the cleaning crew in Akagi, a city in the mountains at the end of the line: they found my notebook. It had been tossed into a recycling bin. It was waiting for me on the platform there. “But you’ll have to hurry,” said Aiba-san, looking at his watch. “The train to Akagi leaves in less than one minute.” He escorted us, running frantically in the lead, to the platform. We barely made the train. I had a few seconds to reach into my bag to give him a box of See’s chocolates that I had brought as a gift to my interviewees. He sternly declined the gift, but I insisted, so he reluctantly accepted it. When we arrived to the tiny Akabi station, two elderly custodians with brooms in their hands were waiting for us on the platform. They bowed to me and handed me my notebook. They had neatly wrapped it in a copy of the train’s timetable. This is just one of many examples of the generosity and commitment to service that I’ve experienced in my short time in Japan. Had I lost my notebook on a train or a bus back home, would anyone care? They probably would’ve laughed me out of the station at the thought of tracking it down. Now, take this comparison to a macro level and you start to see why Japan’s future may be brighter than that of the United States. We could use a few more Aiba-sans back home.

Shibuya

Click on the video below to watch one of the more interesting orchestrated movements of mass humanity the world has to offer. This is the scene on a Saturday night outside Shibuya station, one of Tokyo's busiest stations and neighborhoods on a night like this. I saw this as I was changing trains last night after an interview outside the city, so I reached into my bag, grabbed my camera and started recording. Shibuya station is about 10-15 minutes away from our apartment in Denenchofu. It's a station Lenora and I have gotten to know intimately, as we have to change trains here multiple times a day if we're seeing other parts of the city.

To Burn or Not to Burn

Ever since my neighbor became the Prime Minister-elect of Japan, I’ve felt safer; not that I ever felt in danger in this seemingly safe city. There are now police officers posted on every street corner wearing bulletproof vests and standing in front of waist-high fencing. They make eye contact with each person who passes. I’m always half-afraid that they’ll stop me and demand my identification, but it never happens. They usually smile and say hello to me, letting me walk on my merry way. Yesterday as I was approaching one of them, two young girls were taking photos of another large house that’s two down from the Hatoyama residence. I tried to tell them it was the wrong house, but my lack of Japanese prevented me from doing so.


Today was combustible garbage day in my neighborhood. On Tuesdays and Fridays, residents place all their garbage that is considered ‘burnable’ out on the curb, and at promptly 8am, it is taken away and, presumably, burned. I had a lot of questions about what was considered combustible, and the sign on the light post advertising the pick-up days wasn’t very helpful. My wife and I brought our 11 month-old son here. Were diapers considered ‘burnable’? I knocked on the Webers door to ask. Terry and Sherry Weber live next door. They’ve been working as teachers in Tokyo for 27 years. They told me that up until recently, plastic products were not considered burnable items, but all of that changed this year, and now it’s apparently fine to deposit plastic items like diapers on the curt on combustible garbage day. Either way, they told me, if the sanitation officials see that I’ve tried to sneak in some non-combustibles on the incorrect day, they’d leave it on the curb with a note, scolding me for screwing it all up. I put a bag of diapers and another bag of what I thought were burnable items on the curb, nervous that I’d be the laughing stock of my new neighborhood. An hour later, the garbage truck arrived, two men got out and inspected my garbage, and they dumped all of it into the back of their truck. Whew. Now I’ve got to prepare for Thursday, which is recyclables day. I’m supposed to separate all of my recyclables into paper, cardboard, plastic, and cans, and bundle each of them with string. Wish me luck.

Mister Hatoyama's Neighborhood

Lenora, Rainey, and I will be in Tokyo for the next six weeks. I've received the Abe Fellowship for Journalists, which will allow me to report a series of stories on what the United States can learn from Japan's impressive record of energy efficiency. The following post was written a week ago, a few days after we arrived and the day after the national election in Japan.

Yesterday Japan held a national election. My neighbor won it. Well, technically, his party won it, but it’s assumed that my neighbor, who heads the Democratic Party of Japan, will become Prime Minister within a couple of weeks when the party formally elects him. My neighbor is Yukio Hatoyama. He lives in a large house across the street from the apartment I’m renting here in the tony Tokyo suburb of Denenchofu. Yesterday morning an elderly police officer knocked on my door clutching a map, explaining to me in slow, metered Japanese that his men would be establishing a perimeter around our neighborhood to keep out protesters, non-credentialed journalists, and anyone else interested in engaging in general tomfoolery near the Hatoyama residence (an English-speaking neighbor helped translate). I mustered the only Japanese response I knew (“Arigato!”), not having sufficient language skills to explain that I, in fact, was a non-credentialed journalist. He smiled, bowed, and moved on to the next residence. As early results on the afternoon television news began to confirm that Hatoyama’s party was on the path to victory, my neighborhood, which was virtually silent for my first few days here, started buzzing with activity: Police officers on foot patrol, random passers-by who somehow got past the perimeter stopping in front of Hatoyama’s house to stand and stare before being ushered away, and members of the credentialed Japanese press sitting on the curb in the rain, quietly watched over by the around-the-clock security presence in front of Hatoyama’s home. My wife and I are thinking of baking our neighbor a cake as a congratulations gift. If we could just get by security...

In all seriousness, though, apart from the amazing coincidence that the apartment I rented happened to be located across the street from the inevitable new Prime Minister, my new neighbor has a lot of work ahead of him: Like the US, Japan is suffering its worst unemployment rate ever, and many Japanese are fed up with the Liberal Democratic Party, which, despite its name, is the conservative party that has ruled Japan for 50 years straight. Hatoyama has promised the Japanese more social welfare programs and fewer incentives to big Japanese business, but some experts wonder if it’s a good idea to tinker with a system that’s helped Japan become one of the world’s biggest success stories. Hatoyama has a strong California connection: He spent years getting his engineering doctorate at Stanford University, where he met his wife. He speaks English well; well enough to have written this provocative Op-Ed in the New York Times this past weekend; a vague treatise on how his party would manage relations with the US. More importantly for the purpose of my reporting here, Hatoyama has pledged to make Japan a more prominent world leader in battling climate change. He’s pledged to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25% of 1990 levels by 2020, and has promised to land more jobs for Japanese by helping develop the clean tech industry here. He’s also focused heavily on a bigger reliance on nuclear power for Japan; a stance that is not as controversial as you may think in this country. In recent polls, the majority of Japanese respondents say they’re open to a larger reliance on nuclear power. In a country that imports all of its fossil fuels, nuclear power means more energy security and fewer greenhouse gas emissions (On the other hand, it heightens the very thorny debate of what to do with radioactive waste, a debate that, despite poll numbers, is of big concern to many Japanese). With all these issues to tackle, it’s likely that my neighbor won’t be spending too much time at home in the coming weeks. Maybe I should offer to housesit?

Navigating the Tamagawa

It’s Sunday morning. Rainey woke up at 5am, and with dawn breaking, I decided to go for a run. I saw on the map that there was a riverside park along the Tamagawa south of here. The Tamagawa separates Tokyo from Kawasaki. It’s one of the largest rivers in the city. I ran past the mansions of Denenchofu to get there, and once there, ran through a long, narrow, hilly park that was shaded almost completely by thick forest. The mechanical sound of thousands of cicadas in the trees humming in unison, their tone rising and falling, set the pattern for my stride. Despite it being 5am, there were some people in the park; mostly elderly folks doing taichi or navigating the steep trails. After running the length of the park to the north, I headed south, retraced my tracks, and ran downhill to the banks of the river. The forest gave way to tall grass, and I could see the skyscrapers of Kawasaki across the river. I ran across a bridge to the Kawasaki side, and then ran back, finding an earthen trail on the riverside to run back to the park. The Tamagawa was dammed in two places, and it was very shallow—perhaps 2 feet deep downstream from the dam. Orange coy fish lazily swam against the current, making no progress at all. I ran faster, passing a guy on a bike, and another dam to where the river was deeper. Carp jumped into the air, catching insects just above the surface. When I found the park I started at, I began to run uphill back into the posh environs of Denenchofu.

Tokyo

Lenora, Rainey, and I will be in Tokyo for the next six weeks. I've received the Abe Fellowship for Journalists, which will allow me to report a series of stories on what the United States can learn from Japan's impressive record of energy efficiency. The following posts are a written record of our journey thus far.

The flight to Tokyo was far from full, and we had an entire row to ourselves, plus a bassinet that fastened to the wall where Rainey could sleep. After making the rounds of the plane with Rainey to try and get him to sleep, he finally nodded off in my arms, and I quietly returned to the seat and gently placed him in the bassinet without waking him. Lenora and I were able to sleep for a few hours as he dozed away in his tiny bassinet. When he woke up, he climbed to the top of our seats to see who was sitting behind him. It was a middle-aged Japanese woman who was making faces at him. He giggled and screeched and she seemed like she enjoyed it just as much. Towards the end of the flight, she handed Rainey a piece of origami she made with a Japanese brochure. It was a mother swan with her baby riding piggy-back. This was our welcome gift to Japan: a beautiful work of art generously and meticulously crafted from something that would normally be tossed in the garbage…Japan in a nutshell.

We arrived at Narita at 6pm, local time. In our descent to the airport, the sun was setting, and the clouds glowed a golden-reddish color. The air was clear. We saw Mount Fuji out our window, and I pointed it out to Rainey. When we landed, it was dark.

After disembarking, we were met by an old lady who told us to get our immigration forms ready. She then handed me a sheet of paper labeled ‘survey.’ There was a list of questions about our overall satisfaction with Narita’s immigration and customs staff. She then pointed us to the next available immigrations agent. There was no line, and the staff outnumbered the passengers on the plane. The immigration agent took our passports and forms, asked us to put our right and left-hand index fingers on a silver tab inside of a machine that recorded our fingerprints. While we did this, a tiny camera took a photo of us. The immigration agent smiled and waived us through. The entire immigrations process took three minutes. I was too tired to fill out the survey; it was unnecessary for something that was working perfectly well.

Spring

It's been a nice Spring so far for Rainey: visits from all of his grandparents (Grandpa Schmitz will visit in two weeks), his first two teeth, his first taste of real food (Sweet Potatoes, Oatmeal, Bananas, and Pears), and, most importantly, he is now mobile. Rainey started crawling last week, and he's perfecting it as I write this. He's now at the stage where he pulls his entire body forward with his arms and upper torso, grunting, without bothering to use his legs. On first appearance, it looks like an extreme core-building exercise that a mixed martial arts fighter might subscribe to. But nope, it's a baby who's figuring out how to crawl. Rainey usually crawls towards the most dangerous object in the room. When he reaches it, he sticks it in his mouth. His first day of crawling, Lenora caught him chewing on a power cord with his two bottom teeth. The other day, he was making a bee line for the fireplace. I had the idea of putting him on one end of the living room and on the other, a choice: a loaded gun, a stack of razor blades, and a hand grenade. Which one is most dangerous? Rainey has the answer. A work colleague suggested that we send Rainey's resume to the International Atomic Energy Agency. They could use him to find potential nukes in North Korea. Perhaps he could find those pesky WMDs in Iraq. They could also use him in Iran. Hell, he could have a pretty lucrative high-flying career at this. I can picture Hans Blix and a bunch of weapons inspectors following Rainey as he crawls, upper arms ablaze, through the Iraqi desert, drooling, picking up the scent of a weaponized anthrax plant. He'd find it, and they'd have to pick him up before he started sucking on a warhead. That's my boy.