Tokyo: 4am, Fish Intestines, and the News in Japanese

We found a small sushi counter at the back of the market where the workers eat breakfast, the kind of place that has no sign in English and no menu you can read and exists primarily because the people who work here need to eat at six in the morning and have extremely high standards. I ordered by pointing. What arrived in front of me was, in most cases, something I had never eaten and would not have ordered from a menu I could read. Shrimp soup. Scallop. Ark shell. Squid. Sea urchin. Fish eggs. And, most improbably, fish intestines, which the menu described with a candour that I found both alarming and, in retrospect, admirable.

A colleague at work called Jon had been telling me for years that I would eventually like fish. I had been equally clear for years that this would not happen. Jon was right. Fish intestines have a creamy, faintly oceanic flavour and a texture that is somewhere between tofu and something you can’t quite name. On the bullet train south that afternoon I ate baby octopus tentacles as a snack, as if this were a normal thing that a person from Barnsley does.

The rest of the day was Tokyo at full intensity. The city does not ease you in. The Imperial Palace gardens, which provide about as much sense of scale as anything in the city, are a green island around which twelve million people orbit without apparently noticing how strange it is that the emperor lives in the middle of one of the world’s largest metropolises with a moat and a lawn. I walked to Shinjuku and took the lift to the forty-fifth floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, where the city spreads in every direction to the edges of what it’s possible to see. The building is free to enter, twenty years old when I visited and looking like it was finished last week, connected to the station by an underground travellator that is either very practical or a statement about how seriously the Japanese take the relationship between efficiency and architecture.

Shibuya’s famous crossing is the one you’ve seen in photographs, the intersection where the lights stop all traffic simultaneously and five streams of pedestrians cross from five different directions. It works because everyone in Tokyo apparently agrees that it works, which is more or less the operating principle of the entire city. I stood at the top of a coffee shop and watched it for a while, which is the correct thing to do, and then went to the NHK television studios because I had read that you could go in.

NHK is the BBC’s Japanese equivalent, the public broadcaster, financed by a licence fee that the Japanese pay with considerably less resentment than the British do. The studios were conducting tours, and at one point a guide asked if anyone wanted to sit at the replica news desk and read a script to camera in front of the other visitors. I said yes, partly because I genuinely wanted to and partly because the alternative was watching someone else do it and that seemed worse. There was an English version of the script. I read it in what I can only describe as the voice I imagined a newsreader would use, and the audience, who were Japanese schoolchildren on a trip, gave me a standing ovation that was either sincere or very politely ironic. Sylvia, a schoolgirl from China who had more Japanese than I had, went first and was considerably better.

By the time I got back to the hostel the four o’clock wake-up had caught up with me. I had intended to go out with the Germans again. I went to bed at five in the afternoon and woke up at six the next morning, which is either jet lag or the natural consequence of eating fish intestines before sunrise.

The following morning I jogged around the area near the hostel, bought a rice and vegetable snack from a convenience store, and collected two hot cans of coffee from a heated vending machine, because Japan has heated vending machines for hot drinks, because of course it does. Then I changed my plan and decided to head south to Nagasaki three days earlier than scheduled. The trip was already teaching me something about the difference between a city break, where you are racing against the clock to extract maximum value from a finite number of days, and whatever this was supposed to be, something slower and more open, something where changing the plan is not a failure but the point.

I booked first class on the Shinkansen. The bullet train runs at three hundred kilometres per hour and is quieter than a room in a library. Somewhere outside Shizuoka, Mt Fuji appeared through the window in exactly the orientation of the photograph you have seen, snow-capped, perfectly conical, floating slightly above the clouds like a polite exaggeration. I put down the baby octopus and looked at it for a while.