A far from everyday story of Tokyo folk
Archers star Tim Bentinck waves Ambridge farewell and jets to a crowded, courteous world where everything is TOTALLY different
WHEN you arrive in Japan, you have to forget the cosily familiar culture you’ve just left behind. In Tokyo, I had difficulty imagining anywhere like Ambridge, the fictional village of The Archers, where I play farmer David Archer.
Maybe it was something to do with my meal of what can politely be described as chicken’s backside washed down with a soup that tasted of wet labrador. The chicken was delicious, the soup was an acquired taste.
Certainly my first impression, driving into Tokyo from the airport, was that this is a country that really is different. Every building is monumental. There are huge windowless factory blocks, enormous office buildings and vast freeways that cross over each other on multiple levels and make spaghetti junction look like a B-road.
We started and ended our tour at the tops of mighty skyscrapers, first the Ana InterContinental hotel, where the view from our room on the 42nd floor of a sultry and humid Tokyo evening was like something out of Blade Runner. All we needed was a ninja to explode out of the wardrobe and the film cliches would have been complete.
Our last night was in the sixstar luxury of the Mandarin Oriental, where the responsibilities of the turn-down staff extend to adjusting the feng-shui of the binoculars next to the bed.
It’s worth looking at some statistics about Japan. The population is about 127 million, roughly twice that of the UK. The land area is some 145,000 square miles to the UK’s 95,000. However, only 28 per cent of that area is really habitable, with the rest mountainous. So, as a rough estimate, you’ve got twice the UK population living in half the area.
This is why, as you look out of the Shinkansen bullet train on the Golden Route from Tokyo to Okinawa, you see mile after mile of back-to-back housing, factories and shops on the flat plains as far as the eye can see.
UNLESS you take to the hills, or are like the doughty Australian couple we met who were cycling round the whole country, you’re not really there for any kind of Ambridgestyle bucolic idyll.
That takes me on to another difference: the trains. In Japan they don’t seem to have problems with track maintenance, leaves on the line, or the wrong kind of snow. And despite the fact that hurling oneself in front of a bullet train is the most popular, and regular, form of suicide, nothing seems to stop all trains arriving and leaving on the dot. For about £150 for an unlimited rail pass for a week, it really is the only way to travel. Affordable taxis at the other end make car hire pretty pointless.
If you don’t want to lug heavy cases around with you, just have them sent to your next destination with the amazingly cheap and reliable Takkyubin baggage-forwarding service.
Compared to the West, Japan is an astonishingly consensual society, and therefore almost crime-free. Everyone buys into the idea of mutual respect, honour, face, and politeness. The streets are free from litter, chewing gum and cigarette ends; you can carry wads of cash around with you without fear of robbery. Indeed for such a technologically advanced society, it is strangely unconnected by modern standards and cash is still the easiest way to pay.
And people really do go out of their way to help you – in two cases actually getting off their own train to show us where to go. Almost the only thing you need to be able to say in Japanese, therefore, is ‘thank you’.
The wrong way of doing this is to say ‘orri-gaado’ with a strong US accent. This is pretty insulting. If you want faces to light up with charm at the effort you have made, and be guaranteed respect and helpfulness, take a bit of time to master ‘arigato gozaimas’, stretching out the final ‘aaaaas’ as you smile and bow. If you add ‘doumo’ to the beginning, you really will get people genuinely surprised.
Say ‘hai’ (yes) for every- thing else, and ‘sumimasen’ for ‘excuse me’. Don’t bother learning ‘toire-wa dokudeska’ (‘where is the bathroom?’), as public toilets appear to be mandatory every hundred yards.
And the Japanese take their toilets very seriously – even the most humble has a heated seat, while other high-tech models deliver warm jets of water to crucial areas and automatically flush when you get up.
STRAIGHT off the plane, jet-lagged and in the rain, our first outing in Tokyo gave us a wonderful inkling of what the city was like before postwar westernisation changed it totally.
The serene Hamarikyu Gardens are a haven of emptiness and quiet in the teeming metropolis. There we strolled in misty isolation and took tea, in a proper teahouse, with our shoes off. Having explained the correct behaviour for drinking our ground green tea – its bitter- ness alleviated by the traditional accompanying sweet – our guide amazed us by saying she had another ten years of tea ceremony study to go before she could talk with any authority on the subject. As I’ve now discovered, you don’t begin to understand the Japanese until you’ve read up about tea, temples and tatami mats – the Japanese floor mat.
We were visiting our son, Jasper, who had been working in Tokyo for six months teaching English. The city is vast, and he had only just begun to see what was on offer.
We had only two of our 12 days here, so for a comprehensive choice of things to do I recommend the official city travel guide, gotokyo.org. Also, The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Japanese offers a remarkably thorough insight into the character of the locals.
After Tokyo, we stopped at historical Kyoto, which is all about temples and Geisha.
Like many people, I’ve admired photographs of Japanese temples but you need to
actually get inside one to appreciate the size of the huge timbers used to build them.
In order to support the gigantic roofs on most temples, the loadbearing wooden beams and columns are massive, which explains why these are the only buildings to have survived more than 1,000 years of earthquake, fire, war and bombing.
The temples have a feeling of top-heavy gigantism that is unique to the Orient. Inside, the sense of the past is palpable. The same is true of attending a Geisha show – once you have come to terms with the feeling that the three-stringed Sanshin are completely out of tune, the musicians have never played them before and the singers are ear-gratingly flat.
The music slowly starts to become alluring, and, combined with the grace, discipline, beauty and overwhelming sense of otherness of the Geisha on stage, this is the closest you’ll get to time travel. Utterly captivating.
While Kyoto may be about preservation of the past, Hiroshima is the opposite. Many Japanese cities were destroyed by incendiary bombing during the war, as all traditional architecture was of wood and paper, but the instant destruction of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) by atom bomb is, thankfully, unique.
DESPITE Hiroshima now being a thriving, modern city, to stand next to the Genbaku Dome – the iconic building left as a memorial to the explosion – is chilling, as is the Peace Memorial Museum, which pulls no punches Sitting with a coffee watching two young girls singing and playing guitars, was a moving reminder of the healing power of time.
A trip to Japan without a stay in a ryokan, the traditional Japanese inn, would be a sad omission. Our choice was the Kai Hakone, nestling in the Swiss Alp-like mountains south of Tokyo, where we immersed ourselves in the old culture.
After a day touring the hills in a series of funicular and cable railways, followed by a lake cruise in a pirate ship, we dressed in our yukata and wooden sandals and shuffled down to the onsen, or communal hot spring baths, open on one side to trees and a flowing mountain stream.
From there we shuffled further down to our private booth for dinner – a series of plates of utter visual and gastronomic beauty.
That night, the futons were like clouds, and I did dream of the archers – the Japanese horseback archers of these parts who put on spectacular shows firing arrows while galloping at full speed. Definitely different.