Tokyo and all it entails

Tokyo is crazy.

Since I came to Japan, I have  been told that Tokyo is quite different from Osaka. I thought it might be a true fact albeit wrapped in exaggerations, so I kinda undermined it.

But it’s true. Tokyo is different. Tokyo is colder (literally and figuratively). Tokyo is bigger, busier, more austere and definitely with a lot more people.

During my five days in Tokyo, I have seen more gaijins than I have seen since I arrived to Japan (excluding Kansai Gaidai international students, of course!). Some of them were obviously Tokyo residents. I could deduce that whenever I saw them waiting for a train with a small Samsonite, or whenever they took their Japanese phones with their dangling phone charms out of their pockets. I could also deduce it if they are walking with Japanese women and pushing strollers. But, of course, some of them were tourists… You know, the clueless, most of the time American (sorry!) variety? The ones that stare at you as you’re walking on a random street just because you’re “like them” (ie not Japanese).

In Tokyo I have seen Japanese people dressed in an attempt to look Western, and I have seen Western people dressed in an attempt to look Japanese. The number of Japanese girls with “blonde” hair was way off the charts, just like the number of non-Japanese girls with boots on shorts.

In Tokyo people on the train stare at you, in the eye, and they don’t turn away when you look at them. More hostile? “Hostile” is  a bad word choice, I think. They just don’t…really..care…

In Tokyo, if you’re too slow crossing the street, it would be perfectly normal for other pedestrians behind you to run over you and turn you into a kofta under their boots.

The transportation system in Tokyo is <insert adjective equivalent to “super to the power of gazillion>. How such thing is possible is just beyond me. Looking at the subway map for ONE minor district in Tokyo is enough for my brain to go into seizures.”Punctual” is also too weak of an adjective when it comes to describing how timely these trains are.

Tokyo is beautiful. You can stand in the midst of the 7.41 square kilometre Imperial Palace Gardens, look on your right hand side to find lotus moats and Meji-era structures, look on your left side to find the Nissan headquarters among other metallic, futuristically looking skyscrapers.

Tokyo is NOT as expensive as it is rumored to be. Not by Japanese standards anyway. Then again, when I pay $350 for a freaking roundtrip train ticket, what is “expensive”?

My conclusion after five days was that I would never choose to live in Tokyo. Maybe I can stay there for a weekend, a week, or maybe a month. But to actually live there, that would require monumental mastery in the field of stress management, and that is something I cannot afford.