I love trams.
I never expected to find trams in Japan, they always seem to me like the kind of transport system that doesn’t exist outside of Northern England.
But there’s something simple about them, something harmless where you know you won’t end up in the middle of nowhere with a fine for sitting in first class. Instead it seems more likely that you might inadvertently get off in the 1920s and be stuck for something to do in the interim.
So when I got off my coach from Tottori to Hiroshima and found myself far away from my hotel I just leapt onto the nearest tram and it took me where I needed to be. Ok it wasn’t quite that easy, I did have to wait for it to stop.
I was staying in Hotel Yamato near JR Hiroshima station. I recommend it for the two men in reception who both seemed to be in their sixties and were always very polite and welcoming.
My room wasn’t anything spectacular but the view was. It looked out onto the back of the surrounding buildings; it was bare walls, air conditioning vents and pigeons. There were lots of ramshackle nests built on tiny ledges. It was a real no man’s land between high rise constructions; there were no doors, no access from the street. My window seemed to be the only opening into this secret place and the pigeons looked at me with such settled content that I realised that I was the one on the outside, they were looking through a window at me.
I was badly in need of somewhere to do my laundry. The men at the hotel desk nodded to each other that no, there were no washing machines in the hotel. But there was a laundrette nearby, but quite far away.
I got a more specific answer from the tourist information office in JR Hiroshima Station. It was great to be living so close to them, I could have gone every 30 minutes with a different query: “Why was there a manga about the son of Hitler in my hotel room? Why did the woman in Timely laugh at me? Was it really an act of God to sit me next to a British Missionary on the Shinkansen, or is there a ticketing conspiracy?
I filled my rucksack with dirty washing, got an ample supply of 100 yen coins and made my way to the laundrette. It was down a main street which ran parallel to one of the many rivers which cross Hiroshima.
When guidebooks talk about going off the beaten track and really exploring a country I think they could include this laundrette. Japan is a civilised and clean country but this laundrette was a metal shack with dirt on the floor, rows of rusting machines, a beaten old laundry powder dispenser and an old man in an ancient hat leaning against one of the machines and staring into space.
I tried not to look at the old man. I had a premonition of his starting a conversation with me in colloquial Japanese through missing teeth. I wouldn’t be able to understand him, but knowing me I’d just nod politely through a 40 minute spin cycle and an uncomfortable hour in the drier.
My clothes spinning and my rucksack stowed on a shelf I went back outside. Opposite the laundrette was a large 6 floor Bic Camera selling everything from food processors to radio toilet seats. Outside the entrance a pretty girl was giving out fans – this is a common marketing ploy in Japan, you can fit a lot of information on a plastic fan and in Summer you can be certain people will take them. And employing a pretty girl to give out advertising, well, that’s a marketing ploy everywhere.
I wasted time for two hours and then returned to my laundry. A very similar but different man was standing in a very similar but different pose to the earlier version. I took my laundry and left the laundrette for time to continue to consume: men and machines aging together in a dirty shack built to make things clean, a plastic fan lying on a dusty shelf that was once in the hands of a pretty girl across the street.
I Love You was the name of the Internet Café nearest my hotel. It was on the sixth floor of a bookshop and game store but after going up various flights of stairs and in lifts I discovered that the only means to get to this Internet Café was via special lifts at street level. Once inside I asked in Japanese about the different rates, the guy at the desk replied in English, but bad English.
We continued this language ping pong for some time, neither of us wanting to back down to our own language – for that would make him the loser.
Well anyway, I never was quite sure what the price was but the more times you went the more stickers you acquired – which I could only assume led to some sort of incredible prize like a knighthood.
I wonder if dentists these days still give out stickers. I wonder why orthodontists don’t do it - they should be legally required to. The experience of getting a brace is so traumatic that a sticker is the least they could do to provide some compensation. Ideally, the sticker should look like a beautiful set of teeth, and be the right size to stick over your brace and hide the Frankensteinian mesh.
With these thoughts in mind I returned to my hotel, said goodnight to the pigeons and retired.
