Chapter 4: 1.4

After finishing the exams, I returned to Wakamatsu and finished the graduation ceremony without fear of the young looters stealing the second button of my uniform. The university then sent me an email notifying me of my acceptance, and a few days later, I received the documentation for the admission procedure. The fact that they still require paper documents demonstrates that national universities are an extension of the bureaucracy.

    My mother, who had been glum about me going to Tokyo, finally brightened when she saw the acceptance letter and started contacting the cell phone outlets to apply for the “free long-distance communication plan between family members.” I don’t think I’ll use it very often, but I’ll let my mother do whatever she wants with it.

    However, I desperately tried to stop her from going to Cain’s Home to buy pots and pans and dishes for her son, who was about to start living alone. There were plenty of such things available in Tokyo, and there was no way I would be bringing such a fragile item with me when it would take four days to get there.

    This type of abnormal parental behavior has been widely observed among my friends who were beginning to live alone. According to Kimura (18), a friend from the brass band and an authority on biology, it’s an act of “underestimating their children’s life skills because they are proud of having raised them,” and “marking behavior to leave your mark on your child’s new life.” Well, I don’t quite understand.

    When I told my grandmother in Koriyama about my acceptance, she responded by saying, “I’ll pay for you to go by airplane.” This was something I had expected, but I graciously declined. There was some skepticism about having such a huge sum of money aside from a present for passing the exam, and more than that, I wanted to take the bus.

    It takes 7 hours to get to Tokyo if I fly from Koriyama Airport. It’s convenient, but it’s not very great. I’m not sure how many round trips I’ll take in my life, but I’d like to see the road to Tokyo for the first time with my own eyes. It is important for me to have a physical understanding of the trip because I opted to pursue heavy element engineering in order to travel far away.

    Everyone in my family appears to have heard about my journey to Tokyo through my grandmother, and I received e-mails and letters (letters!) congratulating me on passing the exam from relatives I’d never met. Because it was nearly the same text, I responded with the same text.

    The satellite prep school asked that I submit a testimonial for their advertisement. They said they’d offer me 2,000 yen in book vouchers, so I wrote something along the lines of, “Being able to take lessons at a Tokyo prep school in Wakamatsu through satellite was really advantageous to me when I went to university in Tokyo.” I contacted my parents to let them know that the book voucher would be sent to my house after I left for Tokyo, and that I could spend it anyway I saw fit.

    A local newspaper also approached me about writing an article on me with the title “Wataru Yukawa, who is going to a university in Tokyo,” but I declined. That was enough.

    In this way, the days between passing the exam and leaving were more difficult than when I was a student. It was in my nature to work consistently toward a set objective, such as taking exams, but it was not in my character to complete odd chores that were thrown at me from all over the place in an orderly fashion.

    When I finally arrived on March 21, 2013, I felt a tremendous sense of freedom as I said goodbye to my hometown and boarded the narrow sleeper berth of a long-distance bus bound for Tokyo.

    Ah, that’s refreshing.

 

The pavement on Route 4 was in good condition, as one would expect from a single-digit national route, and the inside of the bus was pleasant even though it was traveling at 150 kilometers per hour. I’ve heard that some large buses of this class employ an anti-weighting board in the suspension to decrease body shaking, but I’m not sure.

    We crossed the Shirakawa barrier on the first day, and by the time we arrived at Nasu, night had fallen and dawn had arrived, and we were surrounded by the Kanto plain. The blue mountains may be seen in the distance from Aizu and Koriyama, but the Kanto region is truly simply an empty plain reaching out beyond the horizon. There’s still some grass on the freshly formed soil, and I couldn’t see anything man-made other than the road we were on. I was afraid that if the bus broke down here, we’d all die from starvation or dehydration.

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    As we traveled across such a terrain, we came across a cluster of buildings in the midst of the plain that resembled Tetris blocks. Passengers arriving in Utsunomiya were informed that they would need to change buses here, then the bus started running again. The frequency with which cities appear gradually increased. Then, on the fourth day, I finally arrived in Tokyo.

    To be honest, until I came to Tokyo, I assumed there was only one large city named “Tokyo Metropolitan.” The name may be misinterpreted as such, but there was no such enormous city on its own.

    Smaller towns, such as Wakamatsu and Koriyama, have always maintained an one city from before the war until the present. However, since Tokyo is a huge metropolis, it appears that there were multiple extension lines within the city, and the city split into many pieces after the war.

    As a result, the 23 separate city blocks are now referred to collectively as “Tokyo.” The functions of the capital city are separated into many wards, and there was an empty wilderness between them.

    However, there are several rapid bus services (10 or 20 buses per hour), thus despite the large distance between the two cities, they are very near in terms of transportation. A schedule is useless in the countryside, unlike in the city. Furthermore, with the completion of the Skytree, the degree of communication skyrocketed. When you stop to think about it, Tokyo is one huge metropolis.

 

The bus rapidly completed the final part of the long journey after leaving the Arakawa Bridge parking lot and arrived at the Toshima Ward Office. When I pulled out my cell phone, the signal display changed to “Toshima,” suggesting that I was now under the telecoms company’s Toshima Ward jurisdiction.

    I instantly pull up the map. Because it is the capital city, communication is extremely fast, and there is a wealth of geographical information. There’s a lot of information regarding services and restaurants scattered across the area. In Wakamatsu, there is just a sketchy map created by a contractor hired by the city hall.

    I rolled about in my loud, low-cost carry-on suitcase and made my way to the university campus first. Even though it was Sunday, the office remained open and ready to welcome new students. When I identified myself as a user of the “University Co-op House Search Support Plan” at the counter, I was handed a key to a campus guesthouse. This is a great plan that offers students from remote areas with a roof and walls to shelter them from the wind and rain until they can find a place to live.

    I caught a glance of the user list, but it appeared that the majority of the other users were from the Kanto region, including Tochigi, Ibaraki, and Chiba, with few names from beyond the Kanto region. There was one from Hokkaido, so he must have arrived by air. It takes roughly 20 hours to go from Sapporo to Tokyo.

    I dropped my carry-on suitcase in a small guesthouse room with just a bed and a desk and started my tour of rental homes. Because the university is close to Toshima’s center, rooms that could be walked to were nosebleed expensive. Since the southern part of the outer rim facing Shinjuku is expensive, I opted to focus on the western side.

    After being driven about by a driver with a very noisy voice, I finally found a place I liked at the extreme end of the city of Toshima. It’s a small room with around 9 tatami mats, built in the late Showa period, but if you open the window, you’ll see a field with a fantastic view where some junior high school students were playing baseball. Two cities may be seen on the horizon. Most probably Nerima and Nakano wards.

    Living in Tokyo for the first time and suddenly being surrounded by skyscrapers like Ikebukuro Sunshine 60 in the middle of the city appeared to make me a bit unwell, so I decided to use this place with a beautiful view as my temporary base.

    I promptly finished the procedures and brought my stuff from the guest house. I flipped over on the fixture bed and shouted, “Woah, I’m the lord of this castle!” but had to cover my lips when I recalled that someone lived directly next door. My parents’ house in Wakamatsu was approximately 50 meters away from the next door, so no one but my family complained when I played the brass at night, but having that many people crammed into one building was going to be quite uncomfortable.

    I decided to go to the supermarket first and make dinner. Because Tokyo is so near to the sea, there was a lot of salty fish on the market, so I decided to make “Simmered Mackerel in Miso.” I went out and purchased mackerel, miso, hot pot, and a cookbook. I was annoyed when I opened a cookbook page about “Simmered Mackerel in Miso” and saw that it was “the number one meal I want to make for my lover,” and furthermore, my heart fell when I realized that “Simmered Mackerel in Miso” has ingredients other than mackerel and miso. I had no choice but to pan-grill the mackerel and serve it with miso paste. It tasted salty.

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