Taking Flight & Landing

Landing at Narita Airport was straightforward and my familiarity with Japan meant that I was really just on autopilot. My Japanese was still reasonable even though I haven’t spoken much since living here thirteen years ago. A local TV crew approached me in their search for stories (and people to follow during their stay) focussing on why each one had chosen to visit. My reason was simple – to see old friends and enjoy the many and various good things to be experienced here. I’m glad they didn’t want to tail me but was grateful of their assistance in finding the correct bus. I have always found the Japanese to be incredibly helpful and polite people and my first interaction confirmed this. Onto the bus and I began my cross-Tokyo journey to Saitama via the raised tentacle-like expressways which extend across the capital and give a good view of this crowded conurbation. The urban sprawl as seen from the Chuo Expressway is vast and I found myself wondering how it is possible for so many people to live so densely packed together. Struck by the apparent anonymity of it all I had to remind myself that all these people are special, unique and quite ordinary, just like me. And that’s okay. I guess generalisations are an easy option for jet-lagged and somewhat jaded travellers like me as they attempt to make sense of such sights before their eyes. But there is always more going on which is usually profound and more complex than appearances. Sometimes not. But on this first stopover on my itinerary (and in a note to self), I hope these assumptions are only ever starting points on journeys to a better understanding and a deeper appreciation of these lives we lead on planet earth. After two months in the United Kingdom following my last aid work contract, I’m well into my sabbatical and beginning a six month journey which leads from Japan to New Zealand, then America and finally back to the UK.

Already I am doing lots of walking, writing and reading. It may be a kind of ‘post-contract trauma therapy for humanitarians’ but I find walking particularly helps. Just how much is required depends on the day but it is much cheaper than visiting a therapist. Yes, aid work has taken a heavy toll on mind, body and soul. The pace and rhythm of walking seems to help purge or process thoughts and ease the way to a more peaceful mind. One of my favourite writers, Robert Macfarlane, talks in The Old Ways (2012) of people who employed solvitor ambulando and thus ‘solved by walking’ the matters which occupied their mind. Simply put, it seems to work. I am currently reading another of his books (The Wild Paces, 2007) in which he describes the peregreni, those ascetics ‘whose travel to wild places reflected their longing to achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes’. These, my Sabbatical Scribblings, contain something of this longing which is well put by John Muir in the following quote: “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in”. Shibuya Junction (pictured above) is perhaps the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world (Google it and see) but it is certainly not wild in the sense I long for. Still, it is a place if you stop and observe can make you think deeply about cities and urban living, which the majority of the world experiences now over fifty percent of us are ‘citizens of the concrete realm’. How much more I felt like a voyeur than a peregrini in Tokyo those first few days and would long for escape from the frenetic activity, bright neon lights and the tide of Japanese masses who swept me along and in upon their crushing tide towards strip clubs, kaiten (revolving) sushi, shops and pachinko parlours where in a noisy, smoke-filled haze people gamble as they guide ball bearings through something like inverse gravity-fed pinball machines. A visit downtown can be bewildering and enough to send any sensible Peregrine, pilgrim or gaikokujin (alien/foreigner) tourist to nearby Yoyogi Park and the peaceful wooded paths of the Meiji Shrine.