1 week ago
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The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance.
Now, 80 years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria – a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and middlemen from the global south – the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. The authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter.
Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades”, and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past 15 years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita airports counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesandō, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.
Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address holidaymakers thronging formerly sedate neighbourhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten, or coffee shop, airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savour the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution”, a term ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.
Tokyo’s race towards peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of about 5,000 square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities such as Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.
Still, mass tourism is as demoralising and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank – I know it is not maliciousness on their part – but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offences invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathises with the family of sightseers blundering their way on to a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases, or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the pavement at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.
Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omote-nashi – basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese – has been popularised by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlour.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.
Mine is not a neighbourhood for sophisticated tourists. Taitō is temples and cheap hotels. The more civilised sightseers are busy elsewhere, I know. Chinese tourists still make up the bulk of travellers to Japan, but there are markedly fewer than five or eight years ago. Perhaps they have had their fill of Sensō-ji temple or find the shoddy stalls in Ameyoko market suspicious. In this part of east Tokyo, the tourists come mostly from Australia or the US, white English speakers decked out in athletic gear as if they expect the flat course from Ueno to Asakusa to tax their endurance. In inclement weather, they cover themselves and their rucksacks in disposable rain jackets, so they look like ghosts coming through the mist.
They approach with a rustle and the rumble of plastic wheels on pavement. They sleep in converted love hotels in Uguisudani. They gather at the mammoth Uniqlo in Okachimachi. They take photographs outside temples in Asakusa. They wear body cameras so that they can show the world their visit to Kappabashi Street. I surveil them without guilt: they have come to turn their tourist gaze on the city, and turnabout is fair play.
Battalions of immigrants have been redirected to this half of the city to serve the tourists, who most likely overlook how the waitresses at Asakusa restaurants are now often Vietnamese students and Chinese sojourners. It is beyond most foreigners to listen for a note in a server’s accent when they speak English or Japanese (now that ordering is most frequently done on a tablet, conversation is kept to a minimum anyway), let alone be alert to telltale, un-Japanese body language.
The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “comprehensive measures for acceptance and coexistence of foreign nationals”, many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a 28-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up as part of the technical intern training programme, a scheme to bring in unskilled labour under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programmes – in 2023 alone, more than 9,000 interns disappeared from the books – they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.
As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated. The ruling centre-right Liberal Democratic party acknowledges them as their sole defence against shoshi koreika – “fewer children and ageing”. Until automation takes a stronger hold – we’re only now phasing out floppy discs, fax machines and employment for life – or the economies of Vietnam and Nepal surpass Japan’s, the only way to keep salad wraps in 7-Eleven is to import staff.
Federations of bureaucrats and upstart politicians dream of an economy based on real estate investment and financial speculation. They would prefer to run their new city with a new population, one willing to render their cash or labour without expecting the power to make demands. Demographic collapse can be sidestepped, tourists and guest workers selected by grade like eggs, quotas adjusted to the whims of finance. The state-affiliated Japan National Tourism Organization is shooting for 60 million tourists a year by 2030. Efforts are under way to entice foreigners to work as farmhands, cooks and truck drivers. Meanwhile, the Japanese population shrinks to a nub.
The guest workers don’t live in this neighbourhood either. My neighbours are the subset known as expatriates: the software engineer from Sweden who sends his daughter to the same school as my son; the English teacher from Tennessee; the Chinese couple who run a signage shop down the block; the Gujarati jewellery dealer I know to wave at, who illegally parks a Maserati with a swastika on its hood outside the mid-rise next door; and the French photographer whose Japanese wife tells me theories about dog training, vegetarian diets and 5G in the vaccine.
I myself followed a woman to Tokyo. We met when she was a tourist in my country. We were to return to her home and then drift through rugged places as tourists together, before I signed up for a master’s in contemporary Chinese literature at Sun Yat-sen University, and she sweated through an undergraduate degree in a more marketable field. But too many months went by. We ran out of money, we were happy and I was trapped. We married at the municipal office in Shibuya, posed for the silly portraits that are de rigueur for newlyweds (her in gown and costume jewellery, me in matt grey tailcoat), and made the formal application to convert my tourist visa to “Spouse or child of Japanese national”, authorised to work in any sector.
I took a job mopping vomit and picking up empty cups at a nightclub in Roppongi. I cleared tables in an Italian restaurant in Harajuku and worked in the kitchen of a pizza shop in Oji, apprenticing under an embittered long-term expatriate restaurateur forced into business with his ex-wife. It felt familiar. I had worked most of my life at the lowest end of the service industry or in warehouses and slaughterhouses. I consoled myself that when I finally finished my novel, it would be more authentic for having been composed while I was forking soggy hamburger buns into the trash. With few marketable skills, I didn’t have much choice.
It didn’t help that I was too stubborn and stupid to learn Japanese. I skipped the free language lessons provided by the Arakawa ward government and worked on my Russian instead, hoping to understand what the bouncers in Roppongi were saying. I practised my Spanish with the Peruvians who worked front-of-house at the Italian place. I never learned a polite word in Tagalog, only obscene slang.
Now I earn a living writing, with wire transfers from abroad. It is better to be in the category of tourist that can call themselves expatriate, even if it pains me to admit I have more in common with the Swedish software engineer across the street than the Chinese student-labourers who spill out of a language school above the closest 7-Eleven in the afternoon.
Being an expatriate author is not as glamorous as I imagined as a boy dreaming of a loft in Tangier with a novel-in-progress spread out on the floor. It is not even as romantic as when I attempted it the first time, spending my savings in Guangzhou, writing unpublishable short stories in between appeals to my mother for another Western Union money transfer. But it does mean I am sought out by sophisticated tourists when more famous Anglophone writers don’t get back to them. This began when the country reopened after the pandemic, and the exchange rate made it affordable for half-famous authors, graduate students with bylines in leftist magazines, and minor internet celebrities to travel to Tokyo.
Flattered by their attention, I was happy to act as de facto tour guide to what passes for “authentic” Tokyo. I met my guests at Uguisudani station, pointing in the direction of a cluster of love hotels where a recent street scuffle broke out between ageing criminals over sex industry protection money, before leading them to the Fujizuka cult mound (a miniature Mount Fuji, relic of a religious movement dating back to the 16th century) fenced inside a backyard shrine. I chaperoned them through the more intimidating public housing developments; usually deserted. I brought them to inspect nagaya, those corrugated-iron-sided terrace houses awaiting demolition. I aspired to reveal history otherwise buried, such as the bones that came to the surface when foundations were dug around Minami-Senju station, where the crematoriums and execution grounds once presided.
“Araki shot pictures for Midori here,” I have told more than one of my guests in Yoshiwara Park, “and now the soapland girls come here to pose for their daily photo diaries.” Around the corner, I pointed out the gory pictures beside the statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon. “Kawabata came here in 1923,” I said, “right after the earthquake, and wrote about the hundreds of corpses of the courtesans and their children, boiled alive in the pond as the fire swept through the pleasure quarter.”
I took my guests for tepid coffee gelatin and slices of buttered milk bread at kissaten between blaring televisions and demented proprietors. I pushed crocks of monkfish stew under their chins, pointing out how the gelatin rendered from fish skin made for an exquisitely rich broth, which could only be cleaned from the palate by buckwheat shōchū. I used to end the tours I gave of east Tokyo at the site of the old labour market, or yoseba, in Irohakai. Some people knew the place by reputation. They had streamed Yama: Attack to Attack, the 1985 documentary about neighbourhood activism, famous for bringing down the rage of organised crime and resulting in the murder of its original director during the production of the film, as well as his replacement after its completion. Even if the neighbourhood was no longer called Sanya (city authorities scrubbed it from maps in the 1960s), some of my guests knew that name from reading about labour struggles.
Sanya provided the foundation for a city now divided between tourists and guest workers. After the second world war, the men who arrived from the impoverished rural regions of the north became permanent residents for its cheap proximity to Ueno station, where the trains dropped them off. The crowded welfare barracks set up by the American occupation were taken over by landlords who carved them up to accommodate even more. The yoseba at Sanya functioned as an auction for human beings. Construction firms listed how many of each particular sort of worker they needed every workday – 10 men with experience pouring concrete, say, and 20 more unskilled labourers – and labour brokers descended on the slums before dawn to negotiate their wages.
The economic miracle fizzled. Sanya became a refuge for the homeless, a place for ward governments to redirect vagrants. The yoseba declined but never went away altogether. Foreign workers joined the natives in hoping for work, but by the time I began coming to Irohakai, there were only a handful of elderly men standing around. The mobbed-up labour brokers had been replaced by subcontractors or man-and-a-van renovation guys. I noticed only a few foreigners, probably Bengali or Nepali. There are better places to find employment.
The men who ran the flophouses and hostels had to adapt. Now they collected a daily housing allowance granted by the government from the demobilised migrant workers. They filled the rest of their beds with sightseers. Sanya, despite being one of the poorest sections of the city, became a tourist destination. As I told my visitors, when I first arrived in Tokyo, the arcade had a roof, which the local government and the developers since conspired to demolish, in part to stop the homeless from sitting under it.
They wanted to see the neon streets of the bubble economy years, still preserved in American media. They wanted to catch the girls in outrageous dresses posing in Harajuku for FRUiTS magazine’s freelancers taking “street snaps” like it was twentysomething years ago. They wanted, even if it would be gauche to admit, to play out their Lost in Translation Charlotte-and-Bob fantasies in a rundown karaoke box in a hip neighbourhood. They wanted to see the bathhouses converted into art galleries. My tour reminded them that Tokyo was just as cruel as anywhere else. “All of this will be gone soon!” I said. I meant it as a lament. They may have been relieved.
If history is any guide, temporary residents will be swept away via deportations or pogroms, or when the next generation moves to the nicer parts of the city. Enclaves may never fill in for neighbourhoods, but neighbourhoods themselves do not last. Tokyo is a young city relative to many other foreign capitals, having become a centre of power only after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. There is little left of the old world, as most of the city was burnt or knocked down in the 20th century. Curtis LeMay torched and demolished 16 square miles with his B-29s. People were displaced. The city expanded again.
In my neighbourhood, most of the native Japanese came from somewhere else over the course of a generation – down from the north to work on the reconstruction of the city, or from the vast, sprawling suburbs. The shrine festivals of east Tokyo are attended by the new young couples, but there are too few dedicated locals left to observe the rites, so the shrine maidens tasked with handing out amulets in their white gowns are girls recruited through temporary labour websites, while stout country boys are hired to carry the shrines in the procession. The Japanese residents of my building are mostly old widows who arrived in the city after the war and whose children have relocated in favour of work and easier commutes. They have no real need to stay here and could be just as happy in Akabane, Minowa or Machiya as they are in Shitaya. The Edokko – someone whose roots in the city go back four generations or so – have always been rare. It is hard to find a number, but a single percent of the population is probably optimistic.
The prospect of being expelled from the city is terrifying. The residents who grouse to newspapermen about the sound of plastic wheels on the sidewalk hate the city, but they are more afraid of their shallow roots being dug up, of towers and chain coffee shops burying all traces of their existence. In a nation that gathers around Tokyo like the last torch in the encroaching dark, being asked to quit the city for a wretched exurban stretch of pachinko (pinball) parlours and family restaurants amounts to exile, even if we’re talking about the native soil of one’s own parents or grandparents. A government policy that offered cash in exchange for relocating out of the city was deemed a failure, and with good reason: to leave Tokyo would be to give up on the dream of Japan’s reconstruction, when the dignity and wealth of the nation was worth any sacrifice, when everyone was told they were witnessing a miracle.
Japan was a miracle! The transformation from a bloody empire to a placid failed democracy is remarkable – even more so because the Allied occupation left war criminals in charge. Its carefully managed postwar economy was a behemoth. Moderate prosperity and lifetime employment was guaranteed if you could tolerate the strictures of corporate life. But the men in charge put it all on black, went bust and made up their losses selling off what remained to foreign capital; Japanese socialism – the command economy responsible for public housing, employment for life and fast trains – was dismantled. Japan became hopeless, and the promised renewal has never come to pass.
And so, everyone is looking backward. The guest worker wants to relive the dream of the 1980s, when they could wash ashore in Japan from Fuzhou or Tehran and entertain hopes of striking it rich and returning home loaded down with foreign currency. The budget tourists photographing the maid cafe touts in Akihabara; the sex tourists in Kabukicho; the solemn, well-dressed tourists in the Andaz lobby; the busloads of elderly European tourists disembarking behind Sensō-ji; and the long-term sightseers who call themselves expatriates – they are no less nostalgic. They want the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan they dreamed of when they were children.
I started meeting those important strangers who reached out to me in the perfumed lobbies of luxury hotels or in restaurants on the upper stories of Nihonbashi and Ginza department stores, choosing the sorts of places that a kyabakura hostess might take a client on a pre-shift date, gorging herself on steak and champagne before marching the man triumphantly into her establishment to be drained of more cash. They were disappointed with my doomsaying about the urbanist paradise. My guests didn’t want to hear that the future here, as everywhere, was human trafficking and budget tourism. Eating pigeon in the satellite branch of a Hong Kong barbecue shop on the upper floor of a crystalline tower, nobody wanted to be lectured about the replacement of housing projects and migrant worker slums with retail-residential complexes.
Political and business elites are enthusiastic for foreigners to solve the demographic collapse, prop up flaccid service sector consumption and reheat the real estate market. As those claiming citizenship pass from the city, its neighbourhoods can be optimised by city planners working for property developers, reconstituted with temporary residents who make fewer demands and who, if necessary, can be exsanguinated from the body politic.
Tokyo is preparing for such a future. But foreign labour has become harder to attract, as Japan grows poorer while its neighbours become wealthier. For tourism numbers to recover to their pre-pandemic peak, let alone grow, the yen would have to be kept at a price that drags down the rest of the economy – to say nothing of the difficulty of guaranteeing geopolitical and ecological stability.
The future will only come when people abandon their faith in sustainable development goals and omotenashi, or in the wisdom of converting red-light districts to duty-free shopping zones and knocking the roofs off the arcades to accommodate more hotels. At that point, there will no longer be enough physical or spiritual remnants to credibly resurrect even the least romantic visions of the past. Those left behind – the grandchildren of the enclaves and the less ambitious products of the expatriate neighbourhoods, the returnees from exile in suburbia, those who have held on – will face the problem of what is to be done with a city transformed to maximise investor confidence. An old society in a poorer country served by young people who have come from far away is one that must look elsewhere for new sources of hope. That is why I stay. If it is true – this time, after so many false starts – that Tokyo is the future, I would like to know what that means.
This piece was adapted from an essay titled Eastern Promises, in the Baffler issue 77, Expatriates
