Japan Expo 2005: Portal to an Alternate Universe

So we went to Japan. Stayed in Kyoto for several days. And naturally, since the World's Fair--which has inexplicably been renamed Expo 2005--was happening just outside nearby Nagoya, a 45-minute bullet-train ride away, we went. I'm not even going to mention the incredible weirdness of Toyota's robotic marching band--well, maybe just a little bit. Picture a marching band consisting of humanoid robots, roughly five feet tall and designed to look a bit like the extraterrestrials in Communion. They have articulated fingers, specially-designed mouths, and robotic lungs. They're playing "When the Saints Come Marching In" on a full complement of instruments: trumpet, trombone, tuba, drums, etc. And they're walking around, dancing, swaying in time with the music. They actually play phenomenally (my god, how long would it take me to become such a good trumpet player? Probably longer than it took Toyota to design the robots). But that's not my point. That's not what Expo 2005 has come to represent for me.

See, the Expo was actually not 45 minutes from Kyoto: it was a further hour out into the middle of nowhere from Nagoya. You had to take a regional train that clattered happily along the tracks, then wait at a futuristic monorail station, and then take said monorail to the Expo. We wisely chose to leave the Expo at closing time, when everyone else left: a human tide of tens of thousands of people. As it happens, tens of thousands of people can't all fit in a monorail or a regional train at the same time. Hence, there was a certain amount of waiting. Hence, by the time we got back to Nagoya, we'd missed the last bullet train back to Kyoto. The train station was actually closing. We asked a couple of employees for help, but with brisk waves of their white-gloved hands they explained: iie, shinkansen wa arimasen, or words to that effect: there are no more bullet trains. How about slow trains? Iie. How about buses? Iie. Hm, maybe could we take a cab back to Kyoto? Oh, wait a sec--45 minutes on a bullet train equals, like, 130 miles. Hm. Somehow I found myself in conversation with a tall blonde Frenchwoman who mentioned that she was taking the slow train to Tokyo; we groused in French about how badly organized Expo-related transportation was.

My signif. oth. and I encountered some station police, so at almost midnight we were sprinting back and forth through Nagoya Station with a kindly midget policewoman (being something of a midget myself I can call anyone smaller than me a midget too) who attempted valiantly, by running around reading signs and asking people questions, to locate some form of transportation for us. We finally sprinted into an office where the kindly midget policewoman and her colleague jointly looked through the Yellow Pages in search of a hotel with vacancies--no easy task at nearly midnight in the city closest to the Expo. Finally they found one! Joy! But it took only cash, no credit cards. This is the single strangest thing about Japan, stranger than eating raw octopus, stranger than hari-kiri: no one takes credit cards. This is the country with humanoid robotic marching bands, trains that go 300km/hour, and toilets that wash and buff your ass for you, yet credit cards remain a little-understood technological marvel. Because of this, we hesitated to go to the Nagoya hotel out of fear that we would thus end up cashless during our last few days in Japan. We would be street people. We would have to beg, or find a guitar and busk, urging strangers to throw coins into a hat. We didn't even have a hat, let alone a guitar. We would starve on the streets of Kyoto.

So instead, in order to have a warm place to sleep, we decided to use our rail passes for a free trip on the night train to Tokyo and then catch the first bullet train back to Kyoto in the morning. Hey, why not? Tokyo may be like 500 miles from Kyoto, but that would give us about 5 hours to sleep in the night train, and then it only takes 3 hours to get back on the bullet train. So we sprinted to the platform with the kindly midget policewoman, during which sprint I experienced a spectacular yet harmless fall, somehow tripping, flipping through the air and sliding a few meters through Nagoya Station on my back. Jackie Chan could not have done it better, and if I'd tried such a fall on purpose I would still be in the hospital today.

It turns out only lunatics take the night train. I mean, other than us. We're there in a non-smoking car with a bunch of loud, chain-smoking Russians and several blind-drunk salarymen who apparently also missed their bullet trains. The train car is brilliantly lit: Japan Rail seems to think that only people who like being awake at night take the night train. Sleep is impossible. The French woman, a school teacher, shows us drawings done by kids in her class. Cute. She's really nice. But, um, it's getting late. I keep dropping hints: Do you think they're going to turn off the lights in here soon? Do you think we'll have much time to sleep? But she withdraws from her voluminous handbag two massive hardback books, the life's work of an African poet I'd never heard of, and shows them to me. At 1:30 in the morning she makes me read this poetry out loud in French, so that I can share her admiration for his exquisite use of the language: "Les freres dauphins," oui, c'est beau comme phrase. Oh, my, god. I'm so tired I'm sick to my stomach. The Russians are arguing and blowing eighteen lungs' worth of cigarette smoke directly at our seats. My boyfriend is virtually comatose. The woman is talking to him in French, a language he doesn't understand at all. He's nodding: mm, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Finally we try to sleep; I tie my jacket around my head to block the light, but unfortunately this jacket, which I wore all day at the Expo over my sleeveless tank top, now smells strongly of armpits. We giggle helplessly in a fog of cigarette smoke and armpit-smell all the way to Tokyo. We make up a heavy metal song called "Night Train to Hamamatsu" (one of the stops on the shinkansen line), inspired by "Trogdor the Burninator" (check out the majesty!), and sing it in our seats. We get to Tokyo Station at about quarter to 5AM and wander around pathetically for over an hour: it's cold, there's nowhere to sit. We speculate on WWLAD (What Would Laurie Anderson Do); she would probably lie down on the floor in some well-trafficked area of the station, spread-eagled, face up, and simply observe how people respond to her. We consider and reject this option. Finally we board the bullet train for Kyoto; it's 6:30AM. In a little over three hours we'll be back in our much-loved, greatly missed hotel room, the little room beside the Shirokawa river, with our pyjamas, our toothbrushes, our--our heaven on earth! I compose the following haiku:

Like a migrating bird,
We are five hundred miles
From our suitcases.

We are so tired that this haiku sends us screaming mad with laughter, flailing in our seats, kicking the seats in front of us (sumimasen! Excuse me!). When the train pulled away, we were still chuckling. Back in Kyoto, in our little hotel room, we slept all day--and when we woke up, we were no longer in the Expo 2005-induced alternate universe: we had come back through the portal without even knowing it. Everything was back to normal. I got yelled at by the hotel proprietor for wearing shoes in the lobby, but that was normal, for Japan.