Sunday, July 27, 2008

The Art of Urban Living

Crossing the street safely is one of many urban skills required
for living successfully in Tokyo.

I have only been to Tanzania once, and that was quite a while ago—back in 1992, to be exact. Nevertheless, I retain some deep impressions from that trip sixteen years ago.

Among these, I remember wondering how my colleagues knew their way around the vast, mostly uninhabited, semi-arid countryside that was marked only occasionally by an acacia tree or scrub brush. We were delivering bags of rice to families suffering from drought and famine. My friends drove without hesitation, arriving at each thatch-roofed hut as if road signs had guided them rather than particular rocks or perhaps the incredibly huge ant hills. I was amazed at their skills that had been honed for living in the bush.

Other skills I saw demonstrated included big game hunting; riding atop huge bags of produce in the back of pick up trucks and not falling off even when vehicles bounced into huge, crater-like potholes in the road; and cooking over an open fire—three times a day and not just for fun while camping.

Living in the huge megalopolis of Tokyo requires an entirely different set of skills. I was reminded of this as I rode on a tourist bus a few days ago and felt admiration for our driver as he navigated two-way streets that could barely accommodate one car at a time, much less our bus. Successfully turning corners with houses built to the very edges of these narrow lanes was another skill that required several minutes of successive rounds of inching forwards and backwards before the bus could clear the space. Although he came to within a hair’s breadth, the driver never scraped the bus, not even once. I was awed.

The experience got me to thinking about the art of urban living—and it most definitely is an art. While Japanese don’t specialize in hunting of any kind nor balance themselves atop trucks for rides on bumpy, dirt roads, they do have their own set of survival skills. In addition to driving on the narrowest of streets, they also are amazingly adept at talking on their cell phones while walking, driving cars, or riding bicycles; growing vegetables in gardens tucked away in tiny spots under verandah clothes lines; and sleeping while standing up on trains. This art seems even more astonishing in that Japanese manage to awaken just in time to get off at the correct stop. (This is one skill I have yet to manage. As a result, I’ve traveled some places I never intended to go as I caught up on my sleep!)

Then there’s the whole issue of trash. Reportedly, in less than 30 years there won’t be any land left in Tokyo for garbage, so trash is a serious issue here. Currently, Tokyo has 17 factory-sized incinerators that burn trash around the clock in an attempt to manage the 2.4 pounds of trash each of its citizens produce a day. (By comparison, Americans generate twice this amount daily.) Recognizing this difficult problem, Tokyoites seem to have developed an inborn sense of how to separate burnables, non-burnables, plastics, cans, bottles, electronic goods, and more. This special DNA also programs them to know which days which particular trash must be carted to neighborhood pick-up spots. (In our neighborhood, burnables go out on Mondays and Thursdays, non-burnables on Fridays, and cans, glass, newspapers, and cardboard on Saturdays.)

By contrast, foreigners lacking this special trash sense get in trouble routinely, especially if they don’t find the right trash pile! Five years ago, upon moving to Tokyo, I made the mistake of going to the wrong trash spot. Suddenly a woman raced out of her house to inform me, not even all that politely, that I was committing a grave sin in disposing of my trash in the wrong place. Never mind that I was only half a block down the street from the right pile and that both locations would be collected within minutes of each other. There is a clear-cut right and wrong to trash in Japan, and I definitely was in the wrong.

There’s so much more that could be said about the art of urban living. But based upon this short course, how do you think you’d fare if you lived in Tokyo?