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Going to Japan

An introduction, of sorts.

By Lee Harker

May 19^th, 2014

I had a relatively simple plan, pieced together over endless coffees, hours of weaving through Google Street View and thumbing through a growing library of guidebooks.

I’d needed something to aim for: I’d left my previous job, stable, full-time, and become an IT consultant with one year-long contract with a single client and no guarantee that I’d have any more work after that. Compared to the career flips of those who blithely jack it all in, vanishing to the horizon with a knapsack, this was a gentle, polite level of risk but still it was more than I was used to.

As I began the contract a fanciful notion began to appeal more and more, when the work ended rather than scurry to find more work I’d take a proper break: I’d travel to Japan, well why not?, maybe live there a few months.

Over the year the contract became more engrossing, stealing most of my time and most of my brain, I didn’t mind too much, I enjoy what I do – but when I wasn’t writing, emailing, sketching, talking and testing I was planning the trip. To begin with a part of me was looking on, amused, at the suggestion I’d actually do it – then I picked up Japan by Rail in a shop in Manchester. I learned about the 21 day rail-pass and thought it’d be a great way to start my trip. A map was purchased and blu-tacked on the study wall, fantasy schedules that made full use of the famous bullet trains to fling me around the country began to be drawn up on index cards, the same way I was tracking the project in my day-job .

The project came to an end but the work didn’t, in fact more work arrived, contracts were amended, and I’m still there, now as a permanent employee and not unhappy about it. I work for nice people.

But now going away for six months wouldn’t work for me or them – three weeks, though, would.

It’s surprisingly easy to get to Shibuya Crossing from the Lake District, via Yorkshire; the most interminable period is halfway into the flight from Heathrow, six or so hours in, where you slump while fidgeting robotically in the blind-drawn darkness to combat a fully-blossomed paranoia about DVT. Each squint at the pixelated map on the seat-back in front suggests the Ural Mountains are actually sliding East to match your speed and distance. Turbulence wobbles you as you finally cross them, doing suddenly unselfconscious knee-bends with fellow paranoids in the galley space by the tail. Pizza is offered at 4am Tokyo time and ignored, a hasty reading of jet-lag advice suggesting strongly that you eat to the new time-zone from the start of a long flight.

Things speed up, a breakfast is served and largely rejected on the grounds that it’s a lump of cake and it’s still a little early. The juice is ok, the coffee eschewed by the still rampant paranoia (diuretics are bad, said the Internet) that will have you drop dead within the confines of Narita Airport if the only-water-no-coffee-bend-and-fidget regime is not followed with rigour.

You thump down in a cross-wind, 9am local time, walk down corridors and with a sudden adrenalin swagger of only having brought a carry-on, stride through passport control, fingerprinted and photographed, breeze past baggage, a nod to customs and then in a flurry of hand-gestures and nods with a nice lady in uniform in the JR Travel Centre acquire a small folded card that lets you board almost any train you like, pretty much, if you ask nicely (and get a little green reservation ticket first).

So you take an escalator down into the basement at Narita, mildly astonished that 4G works underground, Skype the family back home until an enormous white train pulls up precisely on time, board it, and an hour and a bit later still you’re wandering around Shibuya killing time before the hotel check-in time.

It was important to start taking photographs straight away, no pause and no consideration. The residual DVT paranoia melting into a perverse urgency to get the haste out of my system. Nothing I was going to take in the first day or so was going to be well considered, composed or intentioned – jet-lag, adrenaline, nerves, I just needed to ride it out.

Shibuya at midday turned out to be surprisingly non-threatening, for all the crowds and bustle you don’t feel hemmed in. Tourists, foreign and domestic, are everywhere with cameras large and small slung over shoulders – it’s still full-tilt Tokyo, but it’s an easy place to start a trip. Off the main streets are the alleys and cut-throughs where random men whirling about laden with a holdall and a camera making grab-shots are apparently tolerated, if not necessarily welcomed.

I’ve had a hesitant love of photography for a long time, off and on since my late teens. Further back when I was a child I had toy cameras that took real film, 110 and 35mm, took fumbling shots through tiny viewfinders and plastic lenses. Then as an adult I found I liked manual film cameras, bought cheap ones off eBay as digital began to boom, scanned and uploaded to Flickr when it was still a start-up in Canada. It was a sporadic love, a minor passion, often interrupted but never abandoned entirely, boosted by the first wave of suddenly capable camera phones and further trips to eBay. Often, it was a shallow love, but there was something I discovered the more I spent time messing about with cameras.

When I have a camera in my hand, when I have to think about what I am doing, when I make myself think about what I am doing, when I make myself think about what I’m doing while thinking about what is in the viewfinder, when I’m thinking about making what I see in the viewfinder please me, while thinking about what I must do to keep it this way, to be frozen in a single moment, something wonderful happens.

Shutter, aperture, focus, composition. Keeping control of those four simple things and the complex way they each relate. Holding them in my head, out into my clumsy fingers, moving and framing, focusing and aiming, getting the scene back through to my eye, whilst thinking about the photo I want to take. It’s hard then, the brain churns, tumbling over past experience to get it right. Something has to give.

Something does.

Everything else that is in my head.

Stopped. Forgotten. Doesn’t matter. More than that, it just isn’t there to be noted as not mattering. There’s just the camera, the shot, the frustration and challenge of not being as good as you want to be – and moment after delicious moment to get a little better.

I don’t consider myself a good photographer, I’m easily distracted by novelty, new technology, theory and internet forums. What keeps me at it is the feeling I get when I’m taking pictures – it’s a nice feeling, it feels, hmm, it feels healthy (I know, I’m wincing at little too), look, it just feels good.

So this trip is an attempt to get that feeling in place and keep it there for three weeks in a fascinating place. Not much novelty, low distraction, just one bag with some belongings and one camera with a fixed lens – the Fujifilm X100S.

First though, I had to let the first few days of being in Japan wash over me, get it into and out of my system.

Waking up on the second day I was delighted to realise it was morning, not too late on, and that for someone who’d been awake previously for over 24 hours I felt pretty good. Two factors in my favour, I think, firstly the advice about starting the flight on Japan time and eating in accordance with it seems to work. The previous day, having checked into a hotel I’d felt pretty tired by 2pm local time but having a late lunch had perked me up as had the evening meal later that night. Second, I work on the web, I’ve pulled all-nighters throughout my career and although it’s not good for me my body is used to disrupted hours when servers fall over and it can tolerate a large dollop of caffeine.

My hotel was maybe five minutes from Shibuya Crossing and so for the morning I pretty much hung out there, ambling about and getting some of the residual nonsense out of my system. I was here. I was in Japan. I couldn’t help but like the energy of the place, while most of the crowd were just on their way to a meeting, to shop, to get to another part of town, there were plenty who were as excited to be stood in the middle of the road as I was.

In there afternoon I made my first trip on the Yamanote Line that encircles the centre of Tokyo, as an overground line it’s free for rail-pass holders, the only snag being finding the manned booth at the gates and waving the pass at the attendant. Over the trip I became more relaxed about showing it formally, if it’s quiet then you should show it politely, but if it’s rush-hour a casual wave is all they want, they don’t have time for more.

I ended up in Akihabara. It wasn’t intentional really, I’d gone to Tokyo Station to rehearse the trip I’d be making at 6am the following morning. I’d already spent some time with a very helpful tourist booth at Shibuya Station to get my reserved tickets for the journey and wanted to make sure I could find my way to the Shinkansen as missing that train would screw up all of my plans.

With the rehearsal over and the realisation that Akihabara was a couple of stops away, that last squeak of over-excitement made me head over – what if the DVT was just biding its time? – it’d be a shame to drop dead and miss it. I didn’t spend too long, maybe an hour of wandering, as I’d be back in Tokyo in a couple of weeks and planned to see it in full then. I ended up in black and white, looking at people looking; the lights, the noise and the saturated colour on every building saved for the real visit.

I spent the evening wandering back though Shibuya, and watched a memorial procession for the 3.11 Earthquake pass by. It was by no means sombre, the impression I got was they were as much celebrating how they were recovering from the disaster by working together as they were remembering those they had lost.

The marchers and the drumming faded off into the distance and I got a relatively early night. I had a bit of a trip planned for the next day – over 1100km in 12 hours from Tokyo to Sapporo, Hokkaido, via the longest and the deepest operational rail tunnel in the world, on three trains, the first of which would be the 199mph Hayabusa Shinkansen.

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