Eastern Promises

In this sharp, contemplative essay for The Baffler, Dylan Levi King, who has lived in Tokyo for nearly a decade, reflects on the image of the city that foreigners hold in their imaginations, versus the city that actually exists. Where are its citizens, for example? Today, Tokyo is saturated with tourists and workers from overseas. It’s also no longer the “place of sophistication and wealth” that visitors, especially Americans, believe it to be.

And so, everyone is looking backward. The guest worker wants to relive the dream of the 1980s, when they could wash ashore in Japan from Fuzhou or Tehran and entertain hopes of striking it rich and returning home loaded down with foreign currency. The budget tourists photographing the maid café touts in Akihabara; the sex tourists in Kabukicho; the solemn, well-dressed tourists in the Andaz lobby; the busloads of elderly European tourists disembarking behind Senso-ji; and the long-term sightseers who call themselves expatriates—they are no less nostalgic. They want the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan they dreamed of when they were children (and not to be told that four Lost Decades have gone by), to visit temples and shrines and castles (and not to be told that they were built within their lifetimes), to walk in the arcades and pause to take in the labor of an old woman in the window of a senbei shop (and not to be told that her building will be replaced by a business hotel with a My Basket on the first floor), to feel as if they have come to a place that is better for having preserved what the rest of the world has lost.