Please Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

We will soon be making a brief stop at, Shinjuku. The doors on the left side will open.

Please stand clear of the closing doors

My head spins and I can hardly breathe. The heat, the stench of bodies, the discomfort of a stranger's sticky arm making contact with mine as the train wobbles along the track.

It all makes me sick.

I smell someone's breath. It's stale and I think of the fact that I'm inhaling the fumes coming from a stranger's internal organs and I hold back the urge to retch. Then there's the unmistakeable stench of mildew on clothes that just simply won't dry, made 10 times worse when soaked in sweat.

I hate this.
I absolutely fucking hate this.

In the summer months my daily commute to and from work is the sort of petty hell I would wish on my enemies for all eternity. I spend 12 minutes pressed against a complete stranger who already reeks even though it’s 9am in the morning, and whatever brief reprieve I get when the doors open is quickly replaced by the mugginess of the station’s interior with the body heat of a thousand strangers mixed in.

This summer I spent as much time as I could indoors, my electricity bills skyrocketing from the A/C that was on at a constant 23 degrees. I hate the heat. I hate being involuntarily adhered to strangers. I hate sweat soaking through all my good clothes when all I am doing is standing still. I’m constantly grouchy and depressed and with the arrival of autumn and improvement of my moods I’ve come to suspect that maybe my own seasonal depression came in summer.

Sometimes all of this- the heat, the stench, the rain, the crowd, the sweat, it’s all too much for me. My memories of the summer are nothing but unpleasant, and this summer in particular is overwhelmingly so. Yet, it was in summer when I had made my decision to come to Japan, a summer just as hot and humid, and just as unbearable.

6 summers ago I was in Japan. My best friend and I, we were two young girls of 20 travelling together for the first time, to Tokyo no less. We spent 2 weeks at Meiji University attending courses with others like us who loved Japan, walked around in Jimbocho late at night being silly and loud gaijins who followed cute guys into convenience stores.

We went to a maid cafe, karaoke, Kamakura, listened to lectures on Japanese fashion and technology and all other things that made Japan “cool”. We made sushi and went to an Onsen where we saw strangers naked, wildly gestured at menus, drank a lot of tea. When it was time to part, neither of us wanted to leave so badly that we almost missed our flight (which is a story we both will tell to this day) but by the time we arrived back at the airport in Kuala Lumpur we unanimously agreed that we just had the best summer of our lives.

I had a not-so-healthy obsession, clearly.

Summer 2013

Japan was cool. I loved everything about the 2 weeks I spent. Almost all foreigners say this but I was drawn to this inexplicable charm of Japan. I was fascinated by rice balls and game centres, obsessed with cute characters that personified everything from a prefecture to any random company down the street. Everything was so clean, so orderly. I felt like I had found my people , and a place I could hopefully call my second home.

I didn’t care that it was hotter than my hot and humid tropical home, I decided that I could put up with the seemingly non-existent A/C in public places (back home, no one had ever heard of an A/C being on 27 degrees). I could probably live with having to carry an umbrella at all times because the rain would fall a little at a time throughout the day, unlike our sudden torrential downpours. The crowded trains were cool, it was filled with cute Japanese guys and I could take several minutes being crammed like a sardine in a can if it meant I didn’t have to spend 2 hours in traffic to go somewhere 10km away.

All these factors were minor inconveniences, things that I could overlook with my sakura-tinted Japan-loving glasses. They didn’t matter, because I love Japan and I couldn’t wait to come back, for a longer time this time.

20 year old me saw the bright neon lights in Shinjuku and thought I’d never get sick of the view. The toilets here all have bidets at the push of a button and also speakers that make flushing noises, and I could get used to that.

At 27, I find myself no longer a strange, loud gaijin.

I’ve moved from our spacious family home surrounded by a golf course to a tiny 1 room apartment in an area that is technically, Shinjuku. I’ve made the most of my situation- graduated from university everyone here knows, with a degree that nobody has ever heard of. I found myself a job, tried to fit in to society like a good gaijin - the kind of gaijin Japan likes and wants more of.

I’ve adopted the mild Japanese demeanour, have been able to blend in so well that I often get mistaken for Japanese until they realise my grammar and intonation is not quite right. I learned to operate a fax machine, speak in honorifics however badly. I’m hardly ever late, and am constantly self-aware of my behaviour so as not to cause nuisance to others. I even grumble when innocently unaware foreigners stand on the right side of the escalator.

In the 6 years that I’ve been here I have changed a lot. Being away from family and influences back home has helped me know myself better and carve a personality that is I hope, wholly my own. Spending the peak of my 20s in a culture that fascinated me and was so different from my own helped me think about how I position myself in the world, learn about other people, and expand my horizons, for lack of better expression.

Whether Japan has changed in the last couple of years I’m unable to definitively tell. The onigiris are still neatly lined on the shelves, the trains still packed, and I still drink the same bottled tea every day. Yet I have, and maybe that makes this a classic “it’s-not-you-it’s-me” sort of situation because these small things that used to spark joy in me no longer do.

These days I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of people in the city, always either rushing somewhere or standing in my way of rushing somewhere. I grow tired of the expectations that I feel society has for me - to be Japanese enough to understand their non-verbal communication and minor nuances, yet gaijin enough to periodically come up with some groundbreaking idea for change(that nobody will adopt anyway, because like me, Japan doesn’t like change). I am resentful of the fact that people like me, people who initially come here because of our love for this place and are trying their damned hardest can be easily dismissed just because - 外国人だから。

It is strange to me because I often see tourists wandering around Tokyo, wide-eyed and enjoying themselves like I had years ago and I unconsciously feel the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’- as if they were here visiting ‘my’ country. Yet it isn’t ‘my’ country, and it never will be.

I’ve been here so long now that I’ve begun to feel like I think the Japanese way. I’ve devoted more time to understanding their culture than I ever did my own that with every year that passes I feel less and less “Malaysian”.

So here I am, with this Japanese-looking face and Japanese-like demeanour, living in a country that despite all that, never became my second home, but definitely not for my lack of trying.

Some days I shut my eyes when I ride the train in the morning, to shut out the strangers’ faces and the train ads. I listen to the train announcements when I don’t have my earphones in, and that is one thing I know for sure hasn’t changed in the many years I’ve been here.

The next stop will be Shinjuku. The doors on the left side will open.

Please stand clear of the closing doors

I squeeze myself backwards into the train, colliding with a bunch of strangers as the train doors shut in front of me, inches away from my nose. More and more often now I can’t help but think that I’ve had enough of squishing myself onto trains, pretending to be okay and trying to meet expectations of being Japanese-enough but also gaijin-enough to continue to thrive.

So maybe my time here is up. Maybe the doors are closing and I ought to stand clear of them instead of rushing on.

If Japan hasn’t changed, I definitely have.

As I look back on The Best Summer Ever and the terrible, sticky mess of this summer, I think maybe I’ve come full circle. Japan never became my second home, but that doesn’t mean my next stop can’t be.

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