Maps

Everyone in Tokyo gives you a map or draws you a map or does some strange pantomime of a map involving limbs and interlocked fingers and excessively enthusiastic facial expressions (think lots of nods and grins). You would think that maps would help you orient yourself, but in reality they just complicate things...a lot. For one, I'm map inept. I couldn't even read a map of my college campus. I get lost in suburban shopping malls. I still can't find my way around the West Village after living in NYC for five years ("What, no numbered streets? I don't understand."). And here I am in Tokyo, a city that was designed with no rhyme or reason or method behind the madness. There are no street names in any Japanese town, an old WWII technique designed to confuse foreigners. It works. My friend Ken who is so Confucian compares Tokyo to the Japanese language. There's no grammar, no hard and fast rules of what things mean, four different alphabets, an infinate number of interpretations for each tiny verbal iteration. What does all this mean when it comes to urban planning? It means I'm lost, literaly, about 90 percent of the time. Even when I'm not lost, I think I'm lost. I ask directions and people point and smile and I say my best "arigato gozaimasu" but I don't have a clue what they said. So my friends and colleagues and just about everyone else, give me these maps, maps on paper, maps on napkins, maps on the backs of business cards, maps in ballpoint pen on the palm of my hand. Someone who once lived here told me to collect all my maps because one day I would look at them and appreciate them. Well, that might be nice, but I'd really like to look at them and appreciate them now, when I'm trying to find a meeting or running to a dinner party. Because to top off the uber-confusing, no named streets of Tokyo (hmm, could this be "where the streets have no names"?), everyone (and I mean everyone, even the expats who have lived here too long) is always on time. Where I come from, if you arrive in a 15 minute window, you're basically on time. Not here, 2 minutes late and my meeting is already seated, checking their watches, wondering if something happened to me. Some times I'm one minute late, a measly minute, and they'll ask me "Did something happen?" Yes, yes, something did happen to me, it's called Tokyo.