Another Voice in My Head

I must travel to a meeting across town, in ninety minutes but have a conference call in sixty.  I imagine myself with bad connectivity and the shame of bad manners on the Tokyo subway trying to engage in this call and opt for a cab.  It won’t be cheap.  They bellman at my hotel asks me to wait for a cab.  I am already waiting for cab.  We discuss the weather.  He is earnest, firm, gratingly polite in a way that feels patronizing, somehow. We agree it’s a lovely day and I offer that it is much colder in Beijing where I live.  He feels obliged to say “terrible pollution.  You must wear a mask.”  I tell him it’s gotten notably better.  Later I imagine how funny it would have been to provoke him and say that “oh yes, Tokyo is trying to catch up.  Don't worry, your cleanliness will catch up to Beijing one day.  Fear not."   But by then, it’s only an idea.

The call goes well enough as I walk around Kiba station area trying to be polite and insightful while trying to find a cafe to sit down in.  Beneath the ugly highway overpass is a small shrine complex and, discussing website logic,  I stroll in to the small compound.  It looks like most other Shinto shrines with a tiled roof and odd ceremonial fauna marking the way up to the alter.  Wonderfully there is a sign off to one side of the garden and it is in both English and Japanese.  I consider the sign and apparently, this was temple dedicated to commercial prosperity which is rather poignant.  I consider for a moment, snapping a few photos of just how it is one ought to say a Shinto prayer as it sounds like I've come to the right place.  

After lunch, I suggest to my colleagues that some ramen would be great.  There is no ramen to be had in the adjacent mall.  Yes I have had soba before, thank you.  Yes, I've had udon before, thank you,  and it's "no big deal" but if there is something close . . . and yes, of course, someone searches on a phone and discerns that there is a place across the way and we head back towards the temple of commercial prosperity and proceed ahead, beneath the overpass to a small place that specializes in Kyushu ramen . 

Inside two tables worth of young Japanese people immediately reveal themselves to not be Japanese at all.  They are all speaking Chinese.  I am rather tempted to barge-in on their conversation and say: “Hi!  What are you all doing here in town?  Where ya’ from?”  but another voice in my head tells me it would be gratuitous and unnecessary.

 I would have missed it but my colleague who reads Japanese and Chinese better than I, draws my attention to a sign on the wall.  He is translating it for our Japanese colleague and I realize now that it is written in simplified characters.  It is drawing attention to the rule which states that it is forbidden for guests to bring their own food into this place.  If they do and begin to eat or drink their own food there is a seven hundred yen charge for such behavior, per-person.  The sign seems even louder than the two tables full  of Chinese young professionals across the way.  Clearly they are not the first Chinese patrons this place has hosted. There is no such sign in English. I wonder if they’ve seen it.  I wonder if it seems loud and presumptuous to them, as well.  I imagine legions of Chinese bringing their own goods in as its economical and something you could easily do in China, and grumbling when they're told this is bad form, or indeed punishable by a fine, here in Tokyo. 

Thursday 12/20/18