Silent Japan

It was a lousy 30-hour journey from Melbourne to Tokyo, with airplane-seat catnaps and long layovers. I'm still groggy but my internal clock- and excitement- pushes me off my thin-but-comfy futon and out the door of our ryukan. I'm in Japan!

It's cozy and quaint outside the hotel door. We're in one of those densely packed neighbourhoods that fill this city, two-story homes and businesses squeezed together, spotless, well-maintained, and orderly. The narrow street of our hotel leads to another narrow street that looks pretty much the same.

I pick a random direction, note a few landmarks so I can find my way back, and start to walk. It's late January, and we're back in the cold, after a month of blistering summer in Australia. I have every layer of clothes on I brought with me. But it's Vancouver-cold, not Yukon-cold. I'm fine.

It's morning rush hour. The neighbourhood alleys lead to a six-lane boulevard. Just like William Gibson said: the sky's the colour of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel. I've waited decades to see that. I'm in Japan!

And… it is utterly silent.

I stop for a minute and look around. There's traffic, but not a lot. And what there is, is making no noise. No angry horns. No revving engines. Not one of Asia's ubiquitous motorcycles two-stroking through the traffic. There's no birdsound for the blind when the pedestrian sign turns. Cyclists on nerdy old bikes glide past without so much as a chain rattle. It's a little creepy as I cross the street.

Daughter, left, shushing father next to her in mall.

It's not that early- eight in the morning. This is a city of 13 million people. Asakusa is an older part of the city, touristy, with temples and museums and old markets. I figure we're just out of the action here, away from the downtown hustle.

Across the boulevard now. The brick-paved lane has an arched overhang, enclosing the shops and restaurants from the elements. It's quite pretty. Shopkeepers are just arriving, unlocking their doors and rolling out merchandise.

No one is talking much as I wander, looking for coffee. Groups of office workers hustle to their destinations, making asides to each other in barely-audible tones. Women's heels clip-clopping are about the loudest sound I hear. Traffic is banned from this street-turned-market area.

Score one for this gaijin, who finds a McDonald's and can feel safe ordering his first coffee of the day. A few young people, a senior or two, sit silently reading the paper or surfing their mobiles, eating their morning meal.

The next few days reinforce the notion that this is a quiet place. We walk through huge shopping malls, visit tourist destinations, ride the subway, eat in busy restaurants and fast-food joints. There are no screaming kids; no workers shouting instructions to each other. No canned music blaring from shops- (a few times, I catch some mellow jazz playing from a stereo store). Trucks don't seem to have airbrakes (there are a lot of electric cars, I figure out, explaining part of the traffic's lack-of-noise). No jackhammers bang on the street, hydraulic pistons lift nothing, noisy trains are buried deep underground. A police car zips by- even its siren is not much louder than a car horn.

But it's the people that spook me most. No drunks yell abuse down the street, no one shouts their market order, teenage girls don't scream in joy, teenage boys don't bray and puff, no children wail in tantrums, worshippers quietly approach silent temples.

It's like being in some vast library.

I realize a lot of our family communication occurs at pretty high volume. The boy tends to wander ahead of us, or behind- so we call out pretty regularly across a distance to one another. Or when I get mad- when he does something thoughtless or rude in public- I have to work to keep my voice to an excited whisper. And he, like us, speaks at Volume 7 most of the time.

We visit our daughter, in Kobe. One of the first things she does, after the hugs and kisses are done and we're walking down the street, is shush me. More than once, she's mortified when I theatrically react to something, or belly laugh. "Indoor voice, Dad" she says, looking around at the crowd for signs of communal disapproval.

An exchange-program classmate of my daughters (from B.C.) who came along to greet us leans over and says to her 'Your parents have a lot to learn about behaving here, don't they?".

I guess we get the point. Over the next few days we learn to check ourselves. I stop speaking quite so loudly, stop doing cartoon-voice over-reactions to funny things we see, stop calling out to the boy or the wife across the way to come see this or that. Not successfully, not all the time. I am quite aware of being the boorish gaijin.

But there's something sad about how quiet it all is. Japan is mired in a deep, ugly recession that's lasted nearly a generation. In a tougher, increasingly younger and competitive world, it's dominated by a population that's getting older, sicker, more set in its ways.

See that man talking to the guy next to him? Neither do I.

This isn't the Japan I grew up envisioning- the one that, in the early eighties, was going to own us all, with the latest gadgets and most futuristic society. Instead, there are hardly any construction sites in downtown Tokyo; the buildings are all seem designed circa 1995. Archaic tech- like CD stores- still rule. Infrastructure is well maintained, but dated. No one hustled down the street in the Tokyo business district- paces were measured, unhurried. Like they weren't going to get very far anyway, so there was no rush.

Can a whole population be depressed?

We're in Japan 10 days. In the end I drop the wife and boy at Narita airport, and take a bullet train (silent, of course) back to Tokyo. I'm heading to Malaysia and Thailand for work. There's a handful of people in our car, all reading or speaking softly on their cell phones. The train’s pre-recorded hostess murmurs information as we come to stops.

Then I hear it. From the back of my car comes a deep, throaty, hearty laugh. I can identify it right away. It's a North American laugh. Uninhibited, smile inducing. Someone sharing an open, positive emotion with a friend, in public. Out loud.

It's one of the most beautiful sounds I've heard in two weeks, I think.

Also, he'll learn.

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