tokyo dream sequence

written in 2021 for a jessica zafra writing bootcamp

Shimokitazawa, 2024

i miss writing. a lot of the time i think i’ve lost the ability to cobble up a thought or a sentence worth anyone’s time. but nothing quite like a vacation to tokyo, the biggest most populous city in the world, and a good book (martyr by kaveh akbar) to stir the dormant voices in your head. maybe soon! but as i was thinking about writing i remembered that i had a piece sitting in my google drive for years which i gave a part of my soul to put together. five years on, i still feel the same. tokyo is still that secret city, and every complicated feeling i have about it is still some reflection about myself and the city we call manila. i wrote this in 2021 for a jessica zafra bootcamp where she told me, “you’re a writer!” i no longer feel like one, but in my heart of hearts, i know it’s who and what i really want to be.

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1

Every night, after a day of walking around Tokyo, I craft lockpicks with my cat. We live in an attic on top of a back alley coffee shop somewhere in Setagaya, West Shibuya. He tells me I’ve gotten better at crafting. Sometimes we solve crossword puzzles or visit the public bath next door. My cat tells me I look great. He tells me to go to sleep.

But this is just one of my selves. While studying for entrance exams, I was transported to another universe where a handsome man told me I was the priestess of the beast-god Suzaku. I’m also an amnesiac high schooler with a katana that can destroy shape-shifting vampires. I once went to Tokyo for a summer training camp in my quest to become the best in men’s volleyball. In between my raids as the fallen scion of a Yakuza clan, I spend what little money I have on gyudon from Matsuya.

But there is also this other, static, more flat self: I’m a writer without a byline from Quezon City—the biggest, most populous city in Metro Manila. It was named after a Philippine president who wanted it to be a city for laborers and employees. A barrio Obrero, he called it. It once held the title of national capital but returned it to its rightful owner after war-torn Manila was restored. It is home to 38% of Metro Manila’s population, many of whom are still, in fact, workers who choose to make a living in other cities. It is the city I grew up in and is now the only city I know, ever since the pandemic forced me inside.

This is probably why I prefer the occupations of all my other selves, whose lives take them to Tokyo—the biggest, most populous city in the world. And every video game and anime depiction of it tell the same story: If you don’t live in Tokyo, you want to be a part of Tokyo. And if you are from Tokyo, you want nothing but to be rid of Tokyo. Tokyo feels like a secret that everyone is in on. Everyone except you.

Through the eyes of masked protagonists, magical school girls, and depressed mecha operators, I had seen Tokyo. Which is why when I was old enough, self-sufficient enough to buy a ticket to Tokyo, I went without hesitating. I wanted to risk the version of Tokyo in my head to do one of two things: confirm all those years of dreaming and living lives that weren’t my own, or have the city take everything I have long held close to my heart, then have it chew it up and spit it out.

2

The word isekai literally translates to “strange world.” It’s a genre of fantasy popular in anime, manga, and video games where a protagonist is summoned, transported, or reborn into another world. Its origins trace back to a 15th century folktale about a fisherman named Urashima Tarō who encountered a group of children tormenting a tortoise. Moved by compassion, he buys it from the children then sets it free.

A few days later while out at sea, the tortoise appears again. Capable of speech, the grateful tortoise thanks Tarō for his act of kindness and invites him to Rin-Gin, the underwater Dragon Palace. He rides on the tortoise’s back and arrives at the magnificent palace where Tarō meets the beautiful Otohime, the Sea King’s daughter, who turned out to be the tortoise he saved that day. To thank him for saving her life, she offers to become his bride so he can live out his days in Rin-Gin.

He replies, “There is nothing I could wish for more than to be permitted to stay here with you in this beautiful land, of which I have often heard, but have never seen to this day. Beyond all words, this is the most wonderful place I have ever seen.”

After a few days, Tarō becomes homesick. He tells Otohime that he must go home to check on his old mother and father. She attempts to dissuade him, but eventually relents and gives him a token of their love: a jeweled box that he must not open at all costs.

When he reaches the surface, Tarō finds another family living at his house. He learns that 300 years have passed; his parents, friends, and the town he knew were no more. A day in Rin-Gin is equivalent to 100 years on earth. In anguish, Tarō opens Otohime’s box. It’s empty, except for a cloud of smoke that turns Tarō’s hair white and brittles his bones. He ages 300 years and dies on the spot.

There are many iterations of isekai, but it usually follows this basic premise: the protagonist, who is often an ordinary person, is suddenly imbued with power or status in this new world. They might even be a “chosen” one, the savior of that world. A stark contrast between who they might have been in the “real” world.

Perhaps the most important characteristic of an isekai is the constant tension between the new and the old world. The protagonist is always haunted by the spectre of comparison. They oscillate between longing for the old world or staying in the new one forever. Most of the time, if you leave the isekai, you can never return to it.

3

The first time I went, I forced my way to Tokyo. The cheap flights used to depart from the farthest boarding gate of NAIA 3. Here’s what I remember from that day: People sleeping against pillars, fumbling for a ballpen, and almost forgetting my jacket. What I also remember is my fury. “I am going to Tokyo with you,” I declared to my boyfriend when he first told me of his family trip. I didn’t have a visa or any money saved up, but I didn’t care. He abandoned me without a word for weeks and came back one day asking for my forgiveness. The only penance was Tokyo.

What started out as a 12th-century fishing village constantly besieged by fires, Tokyo turned into the axis of Japan’s power. From Tokyo, the last shogun was overthrown and power transferred to the Emperor whose grandson sits in his Tokyo palace to this very day. From there, they built governments but they also built railways, hospitals, subways, and airports. The powerful Tokyo was brought to heel several times after god-ordained earthquakes and as a consequence of starting man-made wars. In 1945, half of the city was destroyed in a bombing raid.

Tokyo, a shanty city besieged by fires and loss, returned to building. They built faster and taller in this century: The tallest tower, the tallest skyscraper, and the Narita Airport. It saw a large urban migration in the 1980s because everyone wanted to take part in this dream because the dream was only a bullet train away. Tokyo is the busiest and biggest city in the world, so big that author David Mitchell said that you cannot always see it because you always see it up-close and everything is over your head.

In Tokyo, men with lip piercings and chains walk next to red-faced men in suits. Everybody walks briskly, like everyone has somewhere they need to be. Bent, curly-haired obaasans chat over stacks of fruit displays in their tiny supaas. Kindergarteners in bright yellow hats squeal at the sight of a big white dog sleeping outside a neighborhood kakigori cafe. A girl with white hair and platform shoes converses with another woman mounting her mamachari. An old man polishes a kokeshi doll made from sakura wood and hands it to the white tourist with a heavy backpack.

There is so much lining up in Tokyo: for tickets, the train, and the bathroom. They have especially long lines for restaurants without waiters because vending machines stand in their place. You punch in your order for ramen and aji tamago and they dispense two colored tickets in exchange. But you can find vending machines all over Tokyo–they light up street corners and side streets, selling all kinds of coffee, vitamin water, and tomato soup. But perhaps the best line of them all is the one for the bathroom because Tokyo’s TOTO washlets are possibly Japan’s greatest invention. These wonderful, marvelous self-cleaning toilets lift the lid and pre-warm the seats as you enter, as if to say “we’ve saved this spot just for you.”

But it still floors me that Shinjuku’s dancing robots and Akihabara’s 24-hour maid cafes co-exist with temples older than my own country’s written history. Tokyo is an intersection of old and new. New as in self-driving cars, a robot named Pepper capable of making small talk and old like the yearly sumo tournaments which have been going on as early as 23 BC. Every July, Tokyoites write their wishes out on colorful strips of paper called tanzaku. They wish for love, success in their careers, and to be better at football. They tie the tanzaku to bamboo trees and hope the hot summer wind can carry their wishes past the buildings and straight into the heavens. This tradition is over 2000 years old.

Tō means East and Kyō means capital, but long ago, some people call it Tokei which sounds a lot like the Japanese word for clock. But in Meiji 30, 1897, national textbooks declared that it was only and absolutely Tokyo. Tokyo, the city that runs like clockwork. Hordes of men—and only men—in the same blue and black suits step in time to some hidden undercurrent, on the way to who-knows-where. Together we wait for the next silent train to violently cram ourselves into. A bell rings, announcing the train’s arrival. The train bound for Shibuya will arrive on line one. Tsugi wa, Shibuya. I look up at a sign that reads: Beware of chikan! Beware of perverts. A diagram of a hand taking photos from beneath a girl’s mini skirt. Mamonaku, Shibuya. Doors will open on the left side.

4

I was 17 when I first saw Shibuya and the world was ending. I woke up in the middle of the Scramble Crossing, not knowing how I got there. Above me, the magnificent LED of the QFRONT flashes in bold, red text: YOU HAVE 7 DAYS LEFT. When I look around, pedestrians transmogrify into shadows which mutate into wolves with fire eyes. A girl in a pageboy hat pulls me to my feet and tells me that if we are to survive, we must form a pact and fight for our lives.

And from my bedroom, in the middle of a miserable El Niño summer, I defeat these monsters called the Noise with Shiki and Mr. Mew, her sentient stuffed cat. I find out later on that we are participants in The Reaper’s Game, a kind of purgatory for people who weren’t quite ready to die. We fight for a chance to return to the land of the living in an isekai of Shibuya. Its missions take us to various locations: the Scramble, Hachiko, Dogenzaka, and Tower Records. We’re told that we cannot escape Shibuya until we defeat the Composer. Shibuya is our prison, Shibuya is the center of the universe.

A whole decade later, I watched the sunrise over a snow-capped Fuji-san from the window of our plane. The ground crew dressed in thick fleece sweaters on the November morning we landed in Narita. I practiced the words “arigatou gozaimasu” over and over, and I’ll never forget when I finally used it, like a hat trick, when the immigration officer returned my stamped passport. I converted my pesos to yen then turned those bills into coins for a one-in-six chance to get my gachapon of choice: a white owl with a gorilla’s face.

We took the Keisei Skyliner, a train that would take us from Narita to downtown Tokyo in approximately 72 minutes. It travels the length of 69.3 kilometers at a speed of 160 km/hour, almost three times the length of EDSA, Metro Manila’s major artery, at three times the speed of the country’s Metro Railway Transit. When I stepped out into Ueno, everything happened all at once. The sight, the sound, the smell. I saw trees the color my country’s two seasons of tag-ulan and tag-init could never know. I heard what a city could sound like if more people walked instead of shut themselves inside their cars. And how Gingko berries, heavy and overripe, stink like vomit when they fall from the trees and burst on the sidewalk.

I also learned that there is something intimate in navigating a city that doesn’t speak your language. It means placing your whole faith in the person that holds the Google Maps. Trusting the mouth that asks the train security guard which train leads to Shibuya. As we descend from the Ginza line stairs, I finally see it–the center of the universe. Thousands of people on four corners of the Shibuya Scramble Crossing hold their breath in the final seconds of a countdown. And at the green light, they spilled over in different directions, crossing straight, diagonally, completing their traverse in 90 seconds. Tokyo is so big and so fast I wonder how lonely it must feel when everything moves at a thousand people per second. I remembered then, amidst everything as I squeezed the hand that brought us there, that I could be forgiving.

5

There used to be a Twitter account called every lot tokyo and it was exactly what it claimed to be. The account posted photos of every lot in Tokyo, every hour, in random order. The photos themselves seem to be culled from Google Maps, featuring nondescript facades, personal car garages, street corners with the occasional pedestrian, faces blurred out. I thought it was freaky and absurd that there was an entire Twitter account dedicated to a surveillance project. How would I feel if my house was retweeted by strangers?

But a year into a pandemic, where travel outside of the Philippines and into Japan no longer feels within the realm of possibility, I’ve relied on the account as my own window to Tokyo. Hoping to one day recognize a lot I might have seen in my previous life. I’ve turned into a Google Earth tourist, re-living and revisiting different spots in Tokyo via Street View: An apartment building in Ginza, our first Tokyo Airbnb; a hostel in Higashi-Nihonbashi, the second time I went with friends; and a motel in Shin-Okubo, where we stayed on our last trip outside of the country.

But there are times when the bot tweets photos that break the disinterested streetscapes: A red room with a solitary black lamp, the bar of an izakaya, and what seems to be the inside of bedroom. It’s weird how these images are both generic and intimate. They could be anywhere, but they absolutely have to be somewhere. You wonder who could have uploaded this photo. You wonder what the story behind it might be.

6

There are two places you are sure to find Filipino tourists in Tokyo: Uniqlo or Donki–the largest discount store in Japan. It’s always a trip to hear Filipinoabroad but I imagine we are all here for the same reason, that is, to buy pasalubong. Frantic Filipino mothers tell their children to grab this and that, to start lining up at the tax-free queue, or to go find their fathers. Pasalubong itself literally translates “(for) when you welcome me.” The practice of giving gifts or souvenirs to those left behind at home which are meant to reinforce good relations or share in the “blessings” of being able to travel in the first place.

A whole portion of my already-meager Tokyo pocket money is allotted for these assorted snacks and tiny souvenirs, as it always has been. Pasalubong is practically my love language, a consequence of being a child of OFWs. My parents–allured by the promise of the American Dream–fill a balikbayan box with a year’s worth of assorted items and snacks which makes their homecoming at Christmas all the more grand.

While gifts can hardly make up for time spent apart, it is one way to try. These gifts are a way of saying: I’ve been thinking of you all this time and cannot wait to return home and give these to you in person. Or: I wish you were here. I want you to know what my experience was like in that other world.

A few hours before boarding our plane back to the Philippines, I was picking up a few more snacks to add to my hand carry. A middle-aged woman with red hair stands next to the display of Tokyo Milk Cheese Factory, a Japanese brand of sweet and salty biscuits. She looks me up and down, and immediately tells me in Tagalog, “These are on sale. If you buy four, you can get the fifth one for free.”

“How did you know I was Filipino?” I asked.

She tells me that she can always tell. She has been in Japan for almost 20 years and hasn’t gone home since. She tells me she hopes to go home before winter, because winter can be so lonely and miserable. She tells me she’d love to see her family again. She looks elsewhere as she says all these things, like this wasn’t the first time she’s talked about this today. I grab a single box and tell her to take care.

The year after, returning home from my second trip to Tokyo, I find the Tokyo Milk Cheese stand is now a Tokyo Banana display. The saleslady was nowhere to be seen.

In 2021, there are roughly 33,862 Filipinos residing in Tokyo. The total number of Filipinos in Japan is somewhere around 325,000, which makes us the third-largest foreign community in the country. The most common jobs for Filipinos in Japan are housekeepers, construction workers, singers, and dancers. The same report notes that Filipino females outnumber males almost 4:1, attributing it to the women who are entertainers in mizu-shōbai, which literally translates to the “water trade.” It’s a euphemism for the Japanese nightlife industry of hostess bars and cabarets. Sometimes it’s a euphemism for prostitution.

7

It’s always November in the Tokyo that inhabits my memories. It’s probably because the three times I’ve ever gone were always in November, and in a pandemic, memories are all you have.

Here’s what’s left of them: An afternoon in Yoyogi Park, plus a terrible combination of soft serve ice cream and Kirin beer. A warm cup of coffee somewhere in Naka-meguro. A breakfast of onigiri and natto before setting out for the day. The big white dog outside the kakigori store in Kichijoji where my boyfriend realized that his passport was missing so we retraced our steps back to Inokashira Park, where I furiously Googled the Japanese words for “help,” “lost passport,” when I asked the park rangers for help, onegaishimasu. We had almost given up, that is, until we returned to the Lawson we visited for lunch. The cashier merely said “ah” when we ran through the doors, a knowing smile on his face. “Arigatou gozaimashita,” I said in a waist deep bow, clutching my heart when he handed back the passport with two hands. “Yokatta,” he replied. What a relief.

“Why always Tokyo?” Asked a friend one day as I was planning my itinerary for what was going to be my last trip ever in 2019. The first answer is obvious: wanton disorder makes sterile efficiency appealing. We were losing five to six hours a day sitting in pointless Manila traffic and it was absolutely exhausting. Which is why stepping on to a train that arrived when it said it would towards a destination that is over 15 kilometers away in under 30 minutes feels nothing short of a relief. In Tokyo, everything feels like it is walking distance.

But I know there’s always more to it. I told him it was because I always leave Tokyo feeling like I’ve discovered nothing. Every time I feel like I’ve come closer to the city’s secret, the door opens to even more doors. So much of Tokyo you can only discover while walking. I can tell you more about the streets, the things I’ve seen and everything I’ve eaten, but it is the same as telling you nothing.

The city is alive, mutating faster than I can keep up with. The more I uncover the more it conceals. Italo Calvino in “Invisible Cities” writes: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

8

On March 1, almost a year into the Luzon lockdown, every lot tokyo tweeted a photo of a dark gymnasium. I recognized the roof panels and the stairs and checked out the address. The photo is in fact the interior of the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, a place I’ve never actually been to.

But this isn’t fully true. I have been there and I fought hard for my right to be there. Our Miyagi volleyball team defeated two powerhouse schools during the SpringHigh Prefecture Qualifiers which brought us to Tokyo. I stood in the middle of that stadium with my team, proud of the fact that we made it to Nationals. All of us are excited for the chance to play the best volleyball of our lives.

Or so the plot of “Haikyu!!” goes. The truth is far more banal: I have never been to the Tokyo gymnasium. I haven’t gone to Tokyo since 2019 and I have no idea when they’ll ever allow Filipino tourists back in. I’ll be turning 30 in lockdown, and it seems possible that I’ll be celebrating more birthdays like this. I wake up everyday and spend hours looking at a screen then unwind for hours on a smaller screen. It’s a preoccupation preferable to the void, anyway, even if it does hurt my eyes. Metro Manila is corrupted; I wonder if all that’s left is to leave it.

Although the kanji characters are different, the Kyō in Tokyo (東京) sounds a lot like Kyō (今日 which means today, which is funny because I want nothing more than to be in warped into the past or summoned into the far future. Anywhere, anything, but the present.

I’d tell the lady who sold me my first Ichigo daifuku in 2017 that there was no need to move her Tsukiji Market stall for the 2020 Olympics. I want to seek shelter from the chilly November rain against the warmth of a pastry display in a well-stocked Family Mart. I want to practice all the Japanese words I’ve picked up in quarantine from watching too much anime and reading too much manga. I want to think for myself “at least that time was good for something.” Who knows, maybe after 300 years, I’d find it in myself to be homesick.

But for now, all I have is today.

∞