‘Let’s go to Japan,’ I casually asked the missus a few months ago, with some guilt that husbands typically carry — some residual shame for performing poorly in one of the roles assigned to you. Hence, you make up for it by popping such proposals.
Mine was received well. The next step was to produce 37 kgs of documentation to prove my intentions of visiting Japan are purely touristic, and there are no plans to establish a new caliphate on the outskirts of Kyoto. After a few anxious business days, we were granted a multiple entry visa, valid for five years — a baton to beat fellow Japan-visa applicants in my peer group.
For Indians, Japan is a unique country to visit. Almost unknowingly, we have prepared all our lives for that Japan trip. It started with watching The Jungle Book on Doordarshan — an anime recreation of the Rudyard Kipling original by Fumio Kurokawa that was dubbed so well that it felt like it was made in Noida. For the kids of the next generation, Doraemon or Shinchan were the familiar manga characters based in the Greater Tokyo area.
Growing up in the 1990s, when you graduated from using pencils to pen, the most coveted pen was the Pilot pen — a treasure of your pencil box, a veritable status symbol. It is a wonder how a pen created by Ryosuke Namiki in 1918 remained a hi-tech product in the classroom of the 1990s.
After school and during the summer holidays, you would visit the video game parlour to play that legendary video game, Super Mario Bros — designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka for Nintendo.
And when you were done playing, your father would come to pick you up on his Hero Honda or a Maruti Suzuki 800 — a bit late, because of the Kaizen training session at his workplace, which earned him a certificate he still treasures.
No school function would be complete without that one kid playing a tune on his “Casio” — a brand that became synonymous with its category of music synthesisers, proudly made in Shibuya. You took a Sony Walkman to college in a distant state — on those afternoons and evenings in your hostel room, those long train journeys, with no mobile internet, it was your best friend, playing all your favourite Kumar Sanu numbers.
Times changed, and you got a Honda Activa to pick “her”/”him” up from their coaching classes, and go try sushi at this new place.
Decades have passed, yet Japan’s influence has been a constant in our lives. Imagine the parents who grew up on Fumio Kurosawa’s The Jungle Book, their kids now swear by buying a Hayabusa. All these thoughts were swirling in my head, as I was polishing off the meal served by the cheerful attendants of the Japan Airlines flight from Delhi to Tokyo. A seven-hour flight, when coupled with free wi-fi, feels like a train journey. Time seems to run faster if there is internet.
I realised, almost everyone around me was making that pilgrimage, like an Indian-origin West Indian making a trip to UP-Bihar. I was finally visiting the country of the animated Jungle Book, the Casio and the Pilot pen — hence, the Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka itinerary. All three cities have served as the capital of Japan at some point of time in history. We were to spend three nights in each city, with a Nozomi Bullet train ride thrown into the mix.
We landed in Tokyo; our hotel room was in the Shinjuku district, which feels like a giant arcade game console. I got the famous egg sandwich from the airport 7-11, and also opted for a cup of coffee. Once done, I had to walk four kilometres looking for a dustbin to dispose of the coffee cup. And that’s why Japan is super clean. There are no dustbins in public places. “Please put the cup in your pant pocket, and go to your hotel room,” someone kindly suggested. And I complied.
Japan barely allowed foreigners between 1603 and 1868 — the isolationist foreign policy called sakoku. This was also a time when India saw many invasions. There is a reason why India and Japan, both having barely any dustbins on their streets, get diametrically opposite outcomes in terms of cleanliness. On that note, sayonara!
Abhishek Asthana is a tech and media entrepreneur, and tweets as @gabbbarsingh. The views expressed are personal
