WALKING FROM SANTO DOMINGO TO TOKYO

I live part of the year in Tokyo and because it’s a habit of mine and because I love the city and wish to know it better (a reflex of love, this knowing-you-better) I walk it.  My phone’s accelerometer tells me I put in, on average, eleven miles a day.   Not tourist got-to-cram-in-all-the-sights miles.  Just everyday expat miles. 

I have my routine.  After a morning of work frustration, I walk deep into Nakameguro, and then loop back home for another round of frustration.  Add to that amount whatever I get into for the evening (always something popping in Tokyo) and that’s my eleven, easy.   

I don’t walk strictly for the fitness, though at 55 every little bit counts.  I walk mainly because the long exertion helps to keep me sane.  What the running used to do for me. 

How I miss running.  I picked it up in college, at the suggestion of a friend who also suffered from depression.  I was always a casual runner, had no natural talent, not like my boy in Oakland who runs marathons, who ranks, but I was diligent.  I ran five days a week, five miles a day (even when I lived in Mexico City and that’s saying something), and that was usually enough to keep the darkness at bay. 

But then after 20 years my back imploded.   

As a result of the spinal surgery and because the darkness wasn’t getting any less oscuro, I had to find another regulator, which turned out to be walking.  Like they say, when you can’t run, you walk — and I guess when I can’t walk anymore I’ll have to figure something else out.  I remember once in Higuey seeing a woman crawling on her knees around the basilica in order to fulfill a promesa, her daughter walking besides her.  I remember a photograph I saw once of Zero Dimension and their Haizuri Gishiki, their ritual crawls around Tokyo. 

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There’s a story my family likes to tell about me walking.  Apparently back when we lived in Santo Domingo I walked clear across the Capital in order to claim a puppy a cousin was giving away.  “Clear across the Capital” was a little over a mile, but still: I was only five years old at the time. 

A Dominican city mile when you’re five, in that heat and chaos, must have been a fucking odyssey.  No memories of the trek (I had walked the route plenty of times with my mom so it wasn’t complete insanity) but I have a crisp recollection of my whole family waiting for me on the street when I showed up with the puppy locked in my arms.  How I managed to pull off that two-plus-mile carry without losing a finger or the dog escaping I cannot say.  Clearer memory: my mom dando me un pela. 

What happened to the puppy?

Gone forever into the memory hole.  

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If I had to create my own walking genealogy, I would skip the puppy, start with my teenage years.   

After my father ran off, my family didn’t have a car or a driver (my moms would never learn how to drive) and since we weren’t living in NYC or anywhere near public transportation that meant if I wanted to go anywhere I had to hoof it.

And hoof it my restless curious self did.  I definitely put in Dúnedain miles in those days.  After all, if poor people know anything, we know walking.  I walked just to get out of the apartment, away from the family implosion, because I was curious about something in the next town over that I spotted on a map or because I wanted to go swim at Cheesequake and had no one to take me, because I wanted to quiet my mind.  But there was one place that my younger self wanted to go more than anywhere else, and that was the Old Bridge Public Library.   The OBPL had amazing SF and Fantasy and Young Adult sections and since we didn’t have a big bookstore nearby … you know the rest.  Understand: I didn’t have sports, I didn’t have a family (not really), I hated school, and was afraid that I was eventually going to blow my own brains out  — books and roleplaying games were about the only thing I had going for me — and so at least twice a week I walked from London Terrace to the library.  That was four miles almost to the inch each way, and yet I must have done that walk at least 200 times in the years before college, no exaggeration. 

Back when Old Bridge was still mostly farms.  On roads without real shoulders.   

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Anyway, I didn’t want to tell you about my back or my long lost dog or my library days.  I wanted to tell you something about walking in Tokyo. 

Some people don’t consider Tokyo a walking city.  Maybe it’s my affection distorting things, but I find Tokyo eminently walkable.  It ain’t Florence or Madrid or Toronto, but it ain’t Orlando or Santo Domingo either.  Sure, a lot of Tokyo can be unprepossessing — i.e. ugly as fuck — but as someone who grew up in the shadows of the Monuments of Passaic County I would argue that ugly as fuck has its own allures, its own insights. 

I’m never bored on my Tokyo rambles.  I’m always discovering, always felicities coming for me — whether it be a peek of a hidden garden, a bit of weirdness bolted onto a façade or a shop that seems to have been around since before the telegraph.  I love the little dogs and their outfits.  I love the lives that I glimpse only in the briefest of intimations.  I love not understanding a word of anything.   I love waiting for lights to change, even on the emptiest of crossings — jaywalking is a huge no-no (helps me with my impatience). 

Do I love the summer heat-humidity-hammer?  It ain’t great, but as someone from the Caribbean it ain’t a deal breaker.  Do I love the mamachari that roam the sidewalks?  I definitely keep my eyes out for them.  Do I love being stared at?  It ain’t great, but it used to be a lot worse back in the 90s when I started coming to Tokyo. 

Personally, Tokyo is both the easiest and the hardest city I’ve ever walked in.  Easy because it’s unbelievably safe.  At least it is for someone like me who grew up in poor hard places.  Crowds in Tokyo mean something completely different to me than crowds in the US or in the DR.  They’re not just different verbs; they’re different languages.  In Tokyo I don’t brace myself when I see, or plunge, into a crowd.  Maybe I’m just not understanding shit, but people seem to more or less leave each other alone, and they sure as hell seem to leave us gaijin alone.  Long story short: feeling safe means that walking in Tokyo frees up a lot of my brain space; I get a lot of free-range thinking done.     

But as I said, Tokyo ain’t all glory for the walker.  If anything is the matter with your legs — you’re in trouble.  And if you need a wheelchair for whatever reason, you’re more often than not fucked. 

And just because Tokyo is safe and orderly and the politest place I’ve ever been, don’t mean it’s always orderly or polite.  (Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.)  Walk around long enough and you will definitely encounter plenty of wildness.   Rush hour, especially.  People racing about without regard to safety.  Mamacharis sweeping sidewalks like low-tech terminators in search of targets.  Swarms of viejas — the infamous obatarion of yore — exhibiting vigor beyond their years and happy to mow your gaijin ass down.  When Gibson wrote that “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” he could have been describing Tokyo at peak commute. 

Walking Tokyo when things get frantic requires a totally different set of skills than walking in NYC.  In NYC, the city I know best, the average pedestrian makes a concerted effort to avoid other people.  After all, in the heavily armed exceptionally violent milieu of the United States, randos are vectors of trouble, and the less contact you have with them the better.   In NYC, brushing past someone at the wrong time in the wrong place in the wrong way could land you in a heap of trouble.  New Yorkers were experts at social distancing before anyone had ever heard the term. 

Tokyo pedestrians are also pavement artists, weaving with the best of them — the city would choke on its density if they weren’t — but at the same time if you walk as much as I do it will sometimes seem like people are intentionally gunning for you, playing a kind of pedestrian chicken.  Not often, but enough to register the pattern.  People will brush past you or throw themselves directly in your path or cut your ass off with an aggression that seems almost personal.  I’ve had people literally dive to beat me onto an escalator.  At first I thought it was because I was gaijin, but then it soon became obvious that most people crossed my red lines without having any clue that I wasn’t Japanese. 

My gaijin theory — what is a gaijin if not someone with half-assed theories about “Japan”— is that this type of collision-curious behavior is a direct by-product of Japan’s legendary safety.  In NYC (at least during the fifteen years I lived there) too close a shave or playing pedestrian-chicken could get you spat on or cursed out or attacked.  But not in Japan.  Barring the exceptionally rare explosion, there’s no real downside to risking close calls with another pedestrian.  A quick sumimasen of mouth and body and off you go.  Given the pressure people are under to catch their trains for work or some other obligation — the pressure not to inconvenience those waiting for you, to be punctual — these razorous near collisions scarcely merit mention, are just part of the spatial idiom of everyday life. 

But for me they’re a challenge, on multiple levels.  Growing up in a poor Caribbean city and close-enough-to-poor NJ cities basically guaranteed that this type of low-key phenomena would fuck with me.  I might be middle-class now, but in the broke-ass neighborhoods of my youth, nearly every kid who was interested in survival acquired a danger sense and to potential threats or violation.  A danger sense and reactivity that I still have.  (Just ask the white tourist, who at an event at the Boston Seaport earlier this summer decided to literally balance their camera atop my friend’s natural hair a second time after we politely asked them to stop.) 

Even though I know it’s nothing — that I’m more or less safe — I still feel a strong disproportionate urge to react every time someone “comes at me” in Tokyo.   

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We walk to travel; we walk to be in the world; we walk to be with ourselves; we walk to remember; and some of us walk to heal.       

I don’t fully remember that quest to get the puppy.  My five-year-old self must have been afraid that I’d get lost or run over by traffic, afraid of the terrors my mother always promised were waiting for us outside the family.  In truth I don’t remember my teenage years all too well either, what it felt to roam so widely, so alone, the close-calls with the traffic, the shouts from the white drivers, the heaviness of books compounding over the four miles. 

But all these selves are with me in Tokyo.  We walk side by side.  I try to hold their hands and hope they’re holding mine.  It’s easier that way – the wildness, the being, the remembering.