Growing Pains and Trains

by Dhirta Jinabhai (Japan)

A leap into the unknown Japan

I love the quiet hum of cables, invisible electricity coursing through a thousand wires that power the magical metal machine known as the train. I love trains, but more specifically, I love the trains in Japan. Four months ago, I left the only country I’ve ever known, South Africa, to start a new job and live a new life in a place I’d only visited once. A quarter-life crisis - a coming-of-age story my generation is all too familiar with - overtook me, forced me out of my comfort zone and into this colourful country of contradictions. I took a leap into the unknown to face my many fears: of failure, of never living life fully, and of never pursuing my purpose. Japan is all at once progressive yet old-fashioned. Traditional, yet futuristic. Welcoming, yet reserved. These flavours were all available from the night I landed in the Land of the Rising Sun – much like their popular collection of Kit-Kats. I quit my job, left my family and friends behind, and boarded an airplane for 18 hours of travel. As soon as I arrived, the train became a powerful metaphor for the journey of self-discovery I’d be undertaking. There are multicoloured trainlines flowing into multicoloured neighbourhoods. I got lost often and felt a mix of frustration, weariness and eventually acceptance. I correctly and incorrectly deciphered the bold strokes of the Japanese alphabet on signboards and maps and screens and I stood on the wrong platforms and stepped into the wrong trains. Making these mistakes was, and still is, very difficult for me, as I was never given the luxury of doing so before. Now I’m learning that accepting my fallibility is the only way for me to grow. Maybe it was the day I accidentally ambled into a street market in the coastal city Atami, where the smell of hot fried squid and crab stung my nostrils, and later, my tongue. Maybe it was the night of New Year’s Eve when I got off at the wrong stop in Edogawa and had to walk through an eerily empty tunnel of horror-movie clichés. These side quests made me realise that learning how to navigate this utterly unfamiliar country was slowly teaching me about navigating an unpredictable life – and surrendering to that unpredictability. I struggled to ask for help but was, of course, helpless without it – and when I did ask, I got where I needed to be. When I got on the wrong train, I got off and rerouted. If I was going in the opposite direction, I paused, recalibrated – retraced if necessary – and then continued onto the right track. Oh my poor sense of direction certainly led me down dark and narrow alleys – but they were crammed with spaces to eat and drink, laughter and smoke, drunk and almost drunk. The trains took me to tourist traps of course, that were simply façades - literally the outer façade of one castle was merely a cover for a kitschy museum of cheap souvenirs. I travelled in the great metal cars to temples and shrines, ancient structures of spirituality, where golden gods and rich red pagodas filled spaces with humility, awe – and Instagram’s crowd of the #blessed. The tracks brought me to bamboo forests, where steep stone paths wound through trees and a cool winter wind breezed over the ceiling of leaves above me. Streams flowed smoothly into rivers filled with koi: creatures I found both grotesque and charming. I emerged from subways to cross famous crossings in Tokyo, to be jostled about in the eye of one of the most crowded storms of people in the world. Dove into shopping districts, deep basements of cheap fashion, overpriced cartoon collectibles and an assortment of accessories for both the innocent and seedy corners of pop culture. I shot up to 600 meters in elevators for views of the city, looked beneath me and saw a roadmap lit up like digital art: beautiful, mesmerising, dizzying and distracting. As my misadventures continue, both mundane and tedious, extraordinary and exhilarating, I pause to listen to the robotic-voiced Japanese announcements in the train, understanding nothing but revelling in the uncertainty of the ride.