Home For Now/Japan: It's a city of insanely overworked people - which perhaps offers a snapshot of all our futures. After a decade living there, an initial rose tint has faded for David McNeill
Last month I was almost thrown out of Japan. I had forgotten to renew my residence visa, normally a misdemeanour solved with a grovelling written apology to the Home Office. But Japan under premier Junichiro Koizumi is growing increasingly nervous about its illegal foreigners, who are blamed for everything from pushing up the crime rate to stealing Japanese women in unreasonably large numbers.
So I found myself in front of a dyspeptic immigration officer who served me deportation papers, meaning a one-way ticket home and a five-year ban from re-entering the country. "Would you like to appeal?" she asked. I almost laughed before replying "of course". There followed a conversation that could have come from the pen of Franz Kafka: "Why do you want to stay?" Let me see; because I live here, work here, and I'm married to a Japanese woman.
"Anything else?" she said, carefully writing down my replies. My wife would have to leave her family and return with me to Ireland, or we might have to divorce. My university would have to find a new teacher. My newspaper would need a new correspondent.
In the end, I was given "special permission" to stay, along with a finger-wagging lecture from my interrogator, but the incident was a jarring reminder that my status in this country is dependent on the flick of a bureaucrat's pen. It was also a small shock to find myself wondering afterwards: if I were frogmarched to Narita Airport, would I have been that upset at all? Japan struggles to win the loyalty of gaijin because it often presents itself as a sort of hermetically sealed racial club, at risk of being contaminated by the outside world.
The Irish of course have no room to be smug, given our own attempts over the last decade to hold the rest of the world at bay. But as the planet's second largest economy, Japan has been attractive to immigrants for a lot longer than the Celtic Pup.
Foreigners still make up just 1.5 per cent of Japan's population, many of whom are Korean and Chinese who were born here but are still classed as aliens. The country accepts roughly 10 asylum seekers a year.
Unique among the more advanced countries, it has not taken in a single Kurdish refugee. As one UN official told me last year, Japan wants all the benefits of globalisation but none of the headaches. The sense that being Japanese is unique and that gaijin are exotic imports from abroad who will soon go back to where they came from is deep-rooted.
Perfectly decent people say things to me such as, "Japan is going to the dogs with all these foreigners", before remembering my presence and adding, "Oh not you David-san. I mean the Chinese." The ultimate compliment in this context is to be told that I've assimilated, become Japanese, because I can speak and act like the locals, although most of the time this has been like trying to pluck my eyebrows with garden shears.
I first came here as a student in 1993 and was immediately blown away by the place: the indecipherable hub-bub and clutter of Tokyo, the lush rice-growing countryside nestling against proud volcanic peaks, the disarming politeness of my hosts and the sense of an ancient culture rushing pell-mell into a vast modernist experiment at a speed unmatched anywhere in the world. This was my Lost in Translation moment, the dislocating but exhilarating sense of being in a place where the normal cultural references don't exist.
The longer I've stayed, the more the rose tint has faded. The Japanese countryside is dying, its old folk farming ever-smaller plots, the lush green is being smothered in concrete. Tokyo is full of insanely overworked people who don't know how to, or are not allowed to, take a decent holiday; modernisation is like a beast out of control, tearing up old Japan and replacing it with car-clogged, ticker-tape fly-overs and shoebox buildings.
In 1993, it was fashionable to speculate that Japan was becoming more like the rest of the world. Many commentators suggested that the power of the iron triangle of business, bureaucrats and government that runs the country would fade, that Japan would soon become more open with a Western-style two-party political system and a citizenry that would demand more time and leisure. Perhaps, though, we could just as easily suggest that the rest of the world is becoming more like Japan.
Certainly on a superficial level, the pace of life in Dublin has come closer to Tokyo than the other way around; the seven-mile-an-hour crawl across a choking city feels much the same, even if the city has better pubs.
The Japanese blending of business and politics, and the public and the private, no longer looks unique after 10 years of endless corruption and political scandals across Europe, and the relentless decline of social democracy everywhere. People in the US and Britain seem to work almost as hard as the Japanese now. Perhaps then, Japan is all our futures.
There are still things to love about life here. Tokyo hums with the sort of energy only a few mega-cities in the world can rival. Despite its enormous size, it still feels as safe as a small Irish town with, in my experience, very little of the random, unpredictable violence that can make life elsewhere so frightening.
Moreover, it's completely klutz-proof, a huge bonus for someone like me who sheds wallets, keys and mobile phones like a dog sheds hair. Time and again my wallet has come back to me without a yen missing, sometimes with a note warning me to be careful.
Let's not forget too that the number of registered foreigners has grown by 45 per cent in the last decade, a sign perhaps that the current anti-gaijin hysteria is a pothole in the long road to a multicultural future. Of course, the vast majority of these foreigners are on the fringes of the system, clinging to insecure, part-time employment and often living in a legal twilight zone.
When I was being quizzed by my irony-free interrogator at the immigration office, I knew I was lucky to be a white English-speaking European married to a local woman and not a Brazilian or Nigerian on a false passport.
Would I stay here if Japan opened up and showered me with all the benefits of its considerable largess, including the traditional salary-man package: a full contract position in a system of lifetime employment with steadily increasing pay and benefits? I had a taste of this two years ago when I worked for a major newspaper: a nine-hour day in a stuffy, hierarchical office book-ended by a three-hour commute and a half hour in front of brain-rotting television before bed. It was hard to imagine six months of it, let alone 30 years.
Yet this is what millions of corporate samurai do year after year, peddling away at the wheels of a system that still churns out a fair proportion of the world's electronics, cars and machine tools.
More young Japanese are rejectingthis, opting to become what are called "Freeters", or free-contract workers. Some believe this and other movements mean Japan is set for revolutionary change. How this plays out makes Tokyo a fascinating place to live, although not the most comfortable. Home for now then. But not home.
Three things I miss about Ireland
High doorways
I'm six foot one inch. Most doorways here are five foot 10 inches or less. I've head-butted so many Japanese doorframes that the shape of my noggin has changed and I'm permanently slouched.
The freedom to be feckless
Discipline and scrupulousness about work, time and relationships is one of the defining features of life in Japan, which can either be enormously reassuring or incredibly wearing, depending on your view. I leave dirty dishes in the sink in the morning, sometimes turn up for meetings late and might let one pint turn into six if the company is good. Where I grew up, that's pretty standard fare. In Japan, it makes me a feckless foreigner.
The Irish sky
The Pacific sky is mostly one hue, metallic grey or azure blue, for days on end. Last time we were home, I drove with my wife from Dublin to Galway, and our strongest memory is not the countryside but the terrible beauty of the unpredictable sky.
What to do in a Tokyo minute
Stay in a love hotel:
Your introduction to Japan's frank and forthright attitude to pleasures of the flesh. There are more than 40,000 of them and they do exactly what it says in giant pink neon: provide somewhere inexpensive to make love. Often built to resemble castles, ships and tropical islands, their kitschy aesthetic alone is worth the price of admission. Blush away, but the middle-aged woman behind the counter has seen it all before.
Ride the bullet train
Still one of the technological wonders of the world. The white-gloved drivers look like pilots, the trolley pushers like stewardesses, and your cup of coffee will barely register a quiver as the train hits 300 kilometres per hour. The only things that make it late are earthquakes and typhoons. British Rail and Iarnród Éireann it isn't.
Climb Mount Fuji
The cone-shaped mountain is a shrine for pilgrims of Japan, a national symbol that graces millions of postcards, Tee-shirts and murals. An unwitting symbol too of Japan's Faustian pact with modernity: you'll have to share your climb with thousands of litter-strewing tourists yammering away to the top, where a grand vista of vending machines awaits.
Visit Shinjuku Station
Go at 8 a.m. when the Tsunami of dark suits, dresses and briefcases which will eventually fan out across Tokyo is in full flow. By 11.30 p.m., the population of Dublin will have trundled through. In between is a snapshot of Tokyo life: from harried morning commuters to drunken salary-men staggering unsteadily onto the last train home. Tomorrow they'll do it all over again.
Eat Japanese food
The sight of thousands of foreigners snubbing perhaps the world's greatest culinary culture to crowd into burger joints during World Cup 2002 broke Japanese hearts. You can repair the damage by trying out sushi, noodles or tempura in some of the 110,000 restaurants in Tokyo (against New York's 18,000).
