Time Broadens Out

Autumn in Tokyo is lovely.  There are maples starting to turn, next to plane trees that have yet to.  It’s still quite warm here at the end of October though a few of the persimmon trees sagging with orange fruit let you know that the season won’t last much longer.  Out in the back of the Miyako Hotel looks inviting as always even though this time I’ve gotten a room so high up I’m merely looking down on the trees instead of out at them. 

The morning meeting: cancelled.  Time broadens out and I consider all the things I will now be able to do.  Down at the gym, it’s packed.  Everyone else seems to have time this morning, as well.  The stair-master machines are all in-use.  I consider a different machine that forces me to step up and down steeply, slowly. The motion is awkward and no matter how I adjust things it remains too hard to push or then suddenly too easy.  Who is this guy standing next to me?  A grey haired Henry Rollins-type who seems grumpy.  He keeps getting off his machine and starring at it from odd angles.  He leaves my field of vision and then returns again. 

To get to the weight room I should technically untie and remove my sneakers to move cross the twelve feet of carpeted floor through the changing room, from here to there, before sitting down and putting my sneakers back on again.  I do not.  I have probably been here fifty times and I studiously ignore this instruction, every time.  In the weight room there is always a young lady who looks after the towels and cleans up the odd water glass.  This woman is always seated behind a desk.  Her main role is providing chit-chat to the older gentleman who invariably take long breaks from whatever they are supposed to be doing to converse, there in the chair beside her desk. 

The gym allows local people to join as members.  “Members” appear to invariably be older men.  Their “club” allows for numerous odd allowances such as this.  We have two strange machines for calves and thighs that use air pressure to register the amount of exertion applied by ones legs when you rise or lower your leg muscles.  Beside the mirror is the obligatory fat-shaking machine, which are popular in South Korean hotel gyms as well.  In the next room is a large area that could be used for some other athletic purpose is slotted as a TV room, where people lounge in comfy chairs and consider the boob-tube.  The gym has never been one of the reasons I love this hotel, but I do appreciate the angular and distinct human annoyances that defies chain hotel homogeneity.  For as long as I can remember the stairway down to the gym always had an automated bird call device that tweeted every time one entered or left.  It wasn’t there this time and I joked about it with the staff.  But to be candid, I was saddened by its absence.  And I felt old.

That night friends had me over to the Tokyo American Club.  I used to belong back in when I lived in Hong Kong where there is a city and a country facility.  I’ve never seen the need for belonging in Beijing, which has the facility in a pointless location, for most of what my family and I do.  Unsurprisingly the service by both the Japanese and the gaijin staff was impeccable.  Sitting out beneath the remarkable view of Tokyo tower, I spoke with one of the staff who was, it turns out, from Romania.  My mind went to Patrick Leigh Fermor and his long digressions about Romania which he as so enthralled by.  And I told her about the author as I had a paucity of other Romanian references. She listened attentively. “No”, she had not heard of him.  I’m glad he liked my country but if he went in the thirties, everything would have been so inconvenient. “Yes, I suppose, but then that would have been the case just about anywhere."  Soon we were on into the best places to visit in the country.  She mentioned a number of cities that I’d never heard of and should have written down. She showed me a photo of an enormous government building on her smart phone.  “It’s very popular with the tourists” she says.  “They love to come look at it because it is so enormous. Many Romanians hate it because Ceausescu built it.  I love it though.  Look at it.”