Obviously, when you visit a place you mainly know from movies of one kind or another, you find yourself thinking ‘but, I didn’t see…’ So, here is a list of things I didn’t see while wandering the streets of Tokyo. Not all of them are bad.
- Schoolgirls in microskirts. Okay, so I saw schoolgirls (and boys, though the boys are a little harder to spot). Actually, I saw kids heading to and from school quite a lot. This included at least a couple of uniforms of the classic sailor suit type along with elementary school kids wearing backpacks and those yellow safety hats you see in anime. But all the girls had respectable skirts and not one of them suddenly turned into a magical girl to fight…
- Kaiju. Despite heading down to the harbour area, I did not see one giant lizard, moth monster, or huge mecha. Actually, not entirely true: I did spot what looked a lot like something from Evangelion or Gundam or something standing outside a building, but I’m almost entirely certain that it couldn’t move. Pretty certain.
- Rain at the Shibuya Scramble. I have this history with going places and discovering that they aren’t as big as they look in movies or on TV. Stonehenge, for example, seems a lot smaller closeup than it does when filmed. The famous scramble crossing (basically, all the traffic gets stopped and pedestrians walk in all directions over the road) in Shibuya is another example. It looks huge in the movies, but it’s not really that big. Also, despite all the movies I’ve seen and visiting in the wet season, it was not raining like someone was using a fire hose to provide the water.
- Zombies. Also, not one single zombie schoolgirl attacked a salaryman on his way home from work. The Resident Evil movies are a lie!
- Cyborg Cops. Nope. There was a koban (a manned mini-police station) right opposite my hotel. Not one of the cops there had cybernetic eyes. Nor were any of them dressed like special ops soldiers. I did see them helping a guy whose bicycle tire had gone flat, but they used a regular pump, not an inbuilt pressurised air tank. Also…
- Robots. There just weren’t robots running all over the place. Come on, Japan, you’ve a reputation to keep up!
- Tilt-rotor Aircraft. If you watch much anime set in the near future, you’ll know that tilt-rotor aircraft are the way things are going. Well, maybe, but all I saw were ordinary helicopters. Also, no think tanks. The only Tachikoma I saw was a model in Akiba (and meeting a real Tachikoma would be awesome too!).
- Bowing. Okay, so there was bowing. I’ve made jokes about the bowing in the Fox books and, to be honest, I think the circumstances were such that there would have been a lot of bowing going on. And the Japanese are a polite bunch, even to awkward foreigners like me. But I was expecting a lot more bowing and I was actually rather pleased to discover they don’t take it to the extremes I think a lot of westerners think they do. (And they make jokes about bowing too much, so it’s obviously a stereotype they do understand themselves.)
- That Can’t Be Legal. Loli is a staple of anime even if it’s really starting to get a bit frowned upon in western circles due to the obvious links to pedophilia. And I did feel tall in Japan. I’m not a tall man; I used to be maybe 5’8″ on a good day, but if I was honest it was 5’7″ and I’m sure it’s always 5’7″ now, but I was above average in Japan. Despite this, I spotted no women no taller than my waist who had to buy their clothing from the children’s section. (I did see someone who barely made it past my waist, but she looked to be in her seventies and might well have been a bit taller when she was younger. The Japanese seem to age remarkably well.)
Oh, and a few things I did see which I was a tiny bit surprised about:
- Maids. They were all out on the streets in Akiba handing out fliers for maid cafes, but there they were, in full costume. I kind of knew they’d be there, but it’s still one of those things that I wasn’t quite prepared for.
- The Gothic Lolita… sort of. There I was walking down to this garden south of Shinjuku and I spotted a bright pink umbrella ahead of me. She was actually shorter than average, but obviously an adult, walking down the street in a Goth Lolita/maid outfit with a pink parasol to keep the sun off. Maybe she was heading for work. Maybe she was making a fashion statement. Whatever, that was a superise.
- Mobile Phones. Japan is a big cash society. Not everywhere takes plastic, though I think most people who live there have a RFID card to handle the subway charges. (As an aside, it was great to see the turnstiles in the subways and surface stations looking just as they do in a few of the anime I like.) When I indicated in a Fox book that Japan had a higher uptake of implanted computers than America, I thought I was maybe pushing my luck a little. Having been there, I feel a lot happier about that prediction. At least in the cities, the Japanese are glued to their phones even more heavily than I see in England. There’s public wi-fi everywhere and they use it constantly. I think I’m safe in saying that they’d embrace implanted technology if it was there to give them even more use of the internet.
- Smoking. I also knew Japan still has more smokers than a lot of western countries, and that they were pushing for people to restrict where they smoked, but I never expected the way they have it handled. A lot of the sidewalks have ‘No Smoking’ signs on the flags, but then you come across a little section which has been screened off at the side of the street and it’s a smoking area. If you’re out shopping and you just can’t wait to inhale toxins, rather than bothering everyone else, you can find a smoking area on the street.
- Vending Machines. I knew Japan was the land of the vending machine. Not even binge-watching anime can prepare you for the sheer numbers. They are everywhere. Behind my hotel there was a little village of sorts; the big streets looked like city streets, but head down an alley and you’re suddenly in a residential area with houses and those wonderfully typical Japanese apartment blocks. And you’ll find random machines selling drinks just standing beside someone’s house. Turn a corner somewhere, and suddenly you’ll find a little huddle of them from a couple of different drinks companies. No obvious reason for them to be there, but there they are. Maybe that’s where the robots are hiding…
