By the third night, something had to be done.
I couldn't spend my entire visit to Japan, or more specifically Hitachi city, sitting in the dark. Everything in Hitachi city seemed to be made by Hitachi, including the TV, which was currently my only source of light. I went down to reception. My Japanese, the most vital sentence of which was "Watashi wa Hitachi no kaisha-in desu" (I work for Hitachi), didn't stretch to technical descriptions and the receptionist spoke no English. I resorted to hand gestures. She didn't understand. I led her up to my room and repeated the hand gestures, more urgently. Eventually she comprehended, took my key and inserted it into a little slot beside the door. The lights came on. The receptionist withdrew armed with the story of the crazy foreign woman staying in her business hotel, a no-frills establishment for travelling salarymen, who sat in the dark for 3 days.
Being in Japan was like being transported through the looking glass to a world which looked Western and familiar on the surface but was, at heart, totally alien. Jetlagged on the train, I painfully spelt out the names of the stations, terrified of getting off at the wrong one. They were listed in Hiragana, a phonetic Japanese script, while I only knew the English name of my destination. The other passengers wondered what I was doing so far from Tokyo. That first night I was too exhausted and relieved at arriving at the hotel to worry about the lights.
Next day I went to work. My first mistake was jaywalking. Faced with an empty road and a bus at the other side about to leave, I defied the red light and crossed, much to the horror of the neatly suited waiting crowd. Blooming cherry trees lined the avenue up to the factory. White-gloved attendants said good morning to each new arrival. Everyone did exercises mid-morning. That evening, I tried to get an English-language channel on the Hitachi TV by dropping coins into the slot on the side. What I got was very strange Japanese pornography, which for all I know was also produced by Hitachi.
Most evenings, I bought a bento box at the 7-11 and walked home past the Pachinko parlours and Karaoke bars. Respectable salarymen rolled around in the streets, exaggeratedly drunk by 9pm, and bought drinks with names like "Sweat" in the morning. My colleagues told me about "Health day", where everyone had to leave work by 5pm to help prevent death from overwork.
Japan taught me that much of what we think of as "normal" or "common sense" is no such thing to the rest of the world. We all see through the lens of our own culture, and that camera does lie, or at least it distorts and colours and limits our view. I was 23 when the lights went on.
