I'm in Hachioji, a satellite city in the Tokyo prefecture, it's after 8am, and I'm doused in two kinds of sweat. One is a result of the humidity, the other, my bank. An automated female voice natters away on the other end of the phone, feeding me information in Japanese. It takes six variations on the +353 dialling code before her sullen Irish sister picks up. She directs me to Liz.
Liz works at the bank’s customer service. “I’m in Tokyo and my debit card has stopped working,” I say.
“How long are you there?”
0 of 4
“My visa says another three years?”
“Oh, okay, uh-huh. Any other source of money?”
“Nope, no, nope.”
I give my details, every last one.
“Ah, I see the problem. The card was blocked today. The pin was entered wrong three times. Michael, it can’t be reversed.”
I pause. All I can hear is a knock-off Zooey Deschanel four-track EP looped through the speakers of an Izakaya, intertwined with a Burger King ad announcing the arrival of the Double King.
"Either we send emergency cash via Western Union, or you go to any bank with an ATM outside and use their pin services. You can unblock it there."
A brief trawl through Google informs me that the nearest pin service is over 100km away in Chiba. My girlfriend gifted me with Matcha Oreos, a Snoopy stamp and chopsticks that declare “The King has his throne: He is the King of Kings”. You can literally get anything here in Tokyo, except meth, or pin services, it seems.
I had moved into my new apartment two days earlier, a simple studio in Mizuho-machi, a place alleged by locals to be “very rural”. With a population of 35,000 and ten cows, it is a field-less suburbia on the toenail of the urban sprawl. Rent is due on day three. In my possession, I had about €200 in cash and an additional issue with furniture, which is to say, there was none.
A pot would be useful, because boiling water in a beer can reminded me how much I enjoy things with handles, and a bed was certainly sought after, since I had been sleeping under a Barbour jacket for two nights.
Fortunately, an alarm clock was unnecessary. Century Zen, where I live, is 400m from Yokota US Military Airbase, and every morning at 5am, an AC H130 fighter jet from the 374th Operations Group whistles 30m overhead piercing the fabric of our dimension. I can typically tell when North Korea is has decided to antagonise the world.
I target a Western Union hidden on the sixth floor of a Hachioji tower a day later, one floor above a shy sex-shop fronting as a J-Pop store.
“Western Union?”
The woman at the counter nods. I produce a mound of identification documents plus the required digits to access my rent.
“My number?”
“Hai, my number," I say pointing at my state, passport and visa numbers.
“Nuh, my number.”
Again, I point. She waves this off, producing a card emblazoned with the words My Number.
“It’s… it’s… social security," another customer says.
“N- uh… no My Number. Where?” I stammer.
“City Office.”
“Where?”
"Don Quixote. "
That means nothing to me.
“Um, you me, we go now,” she decides, checking her watch. “Eeek, five minutes, okay we run.”
She hops around the counter, yanking my arm while lunging for the elevator buttons. The customer cheers us on. We fly into the lift, sprint out of it, dart through a shopping mall and the train station during rush hour. The entire city is covered in three minutes, but as I see City Office looming on the neon and fluorescent horizon, she pivots to say, while contritely bowing, “Sorry, I am sorry.” Of course, City Office, while not closed, finished serving the public four hours earlier.
Money in limbo, and another typhoon starting to whip up, I can only laugh as I thank her. That €200 will buy a bed, pot, washing detergent, a week’s supply of ramen and the train ticket home. Whatever is left has to last until my bank in Ireland sends the card to Tokyo by way of my patient parents in Kilkenny.
I could forget about indulging in the consumerist side of Japan, or such luxuries as broadband. I'd have no fridge, desk, pillow, or washing machine either. It was me, six books, a notepad and two hands for washing clothes. Free of clutter or luxury, and minimalist (though not in the trendy way), the flat was purely functional. Its unpleasantness gave me a kick-start in the process of educating myself on the geography and mentality of this island.
In a two-day work orientation session, I was handed presentation after presentation, filled with advice, pointers on etiquette not merely different, but endless and seemingly arbitrary: Refrain from eating or drinking when walking; don't cross your legs; don't write messages in red ink; don't take calls on the subway; nine to five means 7.30 to six, and whatever you do, never yawn while conversing. Hearing all this I could understand why hundreds of thousands of young people have become hikkomori (hermits).
An American friend I met after relocating here equated navigating these unspoken conventions with joining the army. “You’re just told that you can’t do half the stuff you once did, but at least you know what you can’t do. After that, just find new ways of approaching everything. Otherwise you’ll go postal.”
My girlfriend had to remind me: “Don’t fret over etiquette. Simply try to be a nice person.” I had to apply this to my banking situation and do away with the notion of the debit card serving as a passport to happiness.
It brought to mind a person I encountered before leaving, another Irish girl coming over at the same time. She had been ranting to my girlfriend and me about the scandal that was the 28kg limit on baggage. “I can’t fit my whole life into that,” she complained.
I guess I had an equal clinginess, treating an unreliable chip embedded in plastic as my skeleton key. Is life limited with the loss of a bank card? What do you do if it vanishes 9,565km from home?
Well, I go running with the Western Union woman. I left Ireland for work, but I came to Japan for one bed, one pot, one notepad and an AC H130 alarm clock. That’s what gets me up in the morning.
