May 9th, 2019
Tokyo
I was violated by a toilet last night.
The final push from the airport to hotel was a blur of dark streets and unfamiliar landmarks. Emerging from the underground at my destination station, it took me a full fifteen minutes to figure out which direction to walk the few blocks onward to my hotel. I found my bed, and with a victorious collapse immediately fell into a deep sleep.
Some unknown number of hours later, I was stumbling through the dark in an unfamiliar place. The sun hadn't risen yet. Where was that light switch? All I could remember is that it wasn't in a place I would normally expect it. No bother, I thought smugly as I found my way by touch to the toilet - no lights required. A surprisingly warm seat greeted me - foreplay for what was about to come.
Before I had passed out I had casually acquainted myself with the bathroom setup. Even in my jet-lagged, post-flight stupor I could appreciate its features. As a new hotel, everything was sleek and brand new. The mirror was generously wide, though clearly set at a height for someone a foot shorter than me. The shower was small, but with a hose and stool it was well equipped for scrubbing an imported Canadian. And, the toilet: named Toto, it glistened with technology that I'm pretty sure was more futuristic than my smart phone.
Of curious delight: in lieu of familiar toilet paper and a simple handle, Toto had a control panel on the wall with about a dozen buttons on it. Each button had a cutesy icon next to it, hieroglyphically explaining what it did. As my history of assembling Ikea furniture based on language-less sketches was undoubtedly less than perfect, I was stoked when I successfully flushed the toilet and returned the bathroom to its like-new existence.
But this was all in a flash of light before I passed out. Now, fumbling in a deep windowless darkness, I was relying on a memory I knew couldn't be trusted.
I reached for the center button in feigned remembrance. A mist and a squirt later, I was feeling pretty good about myself. But a minute beyond that I realized it wasn't going to stop. Toto, my new friend, what are you doing?! Fumbling, I tried a button to the right. Wrong choice - this only amped up the pressure aimed at my tenderized backside. In a flurry, my fingers did find the flush button - but the carnival gun that had me in its crosshairs didn't ease off. Frenetically, I mashed my palms across the control panel, a frantic silent prayer for relief. The fountain streaming upwards from below continued to gleefully dance its spray in undulating circles. Finally, a button on the left settled the whole situation down. Sweet relief, but I was wide awake now. I had been abruptly given a language lesson: that the default order of operations was right-to-left just like the written language in Japan.
Note to self: always figure out a safe word before giving a bidet the go-ahead.
Today was a day of walking in ever-widening circles and orienting myself. Find breakfast at nearby convenience store? Check. Get subway pass? Check...eventually. Forget to eat and stumble into a cramped restaurant where I'm served raw chicken for lunch? Uh, check. SIM card figured out for my phone? CHECK.
These simple tasks would have been much easier if I had done that last one, first.
Google Maps is an essential tool to have in your pocket here. Absurdly, the buildings in a neighbourhood are numbered in the order they were constructed - not sequentially / sensibly, where they indicate their location relative to each other in the street. It would seem that they just never got around to changing the system, and so even the locals walk around with their phones in front of them as they navigate the megacity.
Technology is still no replacement for knowing where you're going though. Tokyo is built upward in remarkable density, which throws off the phone's GPS and makes it difficult to pinpoint your location. This also means that even when you're near your destination there remains the 3-D puzzle of: how do I get three floors underground or nine floors up, if I can even discern which of the two my goal is?
I ended up walking over 30 km today, exploring a radius around my hotel in lieu of a subway pass.
Breakfast deserves a special nod. My first meal proper in the city (before the happenchance raw chicken of my late lunch) was an egg salad sandwich from Lawson convenience store. Anthony Bourdain swears by these and he did not steer me wrong.
Tomorrow: Tokyo, take two.
D