FOBOS (Spaces of Life and Death in Tokyo)
(January 2017)
Part 1: Gaijin House
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In the summer of 2009, I moved into my new apartment in Nakameguro, Tokyo. I’ve had stayed in Nakameguro since my arrival in Japan, for two and a half years already, and I loved it there. Nakameguro was right below Shibuya, where I hung out whenever I had the time and the money to spend. Shibuya was the playground of my choice, with its neon-lit streets and cheap bars and restaurants, crowded with young hip Japanese looking for cheap amusements in a night out in town. Nakameguro on the other side, only two stations away, was my sleepy hometown, with its small temples and shrines and endless rows of cherry blossom trees along the Meguro river.
Nakameguro (in Japanese 中目黒) directly translates into 中 Naka ( = The Middle) 目 Me ( = The Eye) 黒 Guro ( = Black), meaning more or less: „The black center of the eye“.
As a slightly superstitious guy who earns his money with photography, I instantly loved that name. I was obsessed with the act of looking since I was a little child, my father being an optician. I vividly remember the refraction room of his shop, where he would test his clients’ vision, and where I would spend hours never getting tired of disassembling and reassembling anatomical plastic models of eyes after school. It was clear from the beginning that Nakameguro, the center of the black of the eye, was my hood. I didn’t want to live anywhere else.
/
Two months before moving into the new apartment I had lost my tiny 7.5 sqm room in a so-called Gaijin-house, an old and shaggy Japanese building owned by some shady real-estate company, who euphemistically named themselves “Sakura House” (Cherry-Blossom-House). They owned derelict houses all over Tokyo and rented out rooms with shared kitchens and bathrooms to Foreigners ( = Gaijins) only. The building in Nakameguro was so run-down that no Japanese wanted to move in there. By rental contract I was not allowed to bring Japanese friends into the building, probably a measure of precaution to avoid questions by concerned Japanese, who wouldn’t understand how in the world a Japanese company could rent out such small rooms in run-down-buildings like this at such horrendous prices. It was a complete rip-off, but as a Gaijin you did not have much of a choice if you didn’t have the money to pay for a real estate agent who’s offering exclusive apartments for foreigners. Apartments for Gaijins were generally rare and firmly placed in the category of luxury housing, aiming for kids from rich families and wealthy stockbrokers. It wasn’t my world. I just couldn’t afford a serviced apartment right next to the Prada building.
My room was not only the cheapest in the house but also the smallest, right under the staircase leading to the second floor. They still made me pay around 900 Euros per month for it. I think it must have been a storage room before they remodeled it into a bedroom for some lousy foreigner like me. The space measured around 3 meters in length and about 2 meters in width. The walls were made from wooden boards, as the whole building was a traditional Japanese wooden structure that moved and creaked with every small earthquake, which were all too common in Tokyo.
There was a single stained mattress in a shakey metal frame that was squeezed under the staircase that cut through my room’s ceiling right above the bed. Whenever another tenant went up the stairs it would rain a cloud of fine dusty wood-particles onto me. Besides the bed, there was exactly enough space for one mini-fridge the size of a beer crate, as well as a cheap plastic table and a single folding chair. It wouldn’t have been possible to pack more furnishings into that space without making it impossible to enter the room. It was just enough floor space left for one person standing, and that was me, but I still had to watch out not to run into the bare lightbulb that was hanging there, in the center of the space from the ceiling. I hit it every time I crossed the room.
A rickety sliding door was leading out of the room opposite the entrance door into a bath-towel-sized backyard, with a tiny wooden terrace that was wildly overgrown by shrubbery and weeds that were ferociously manifesting themselves in front of a massive grey stone wall.
I liked it.
To mark my newly won territory I pinned my theatric poster of Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” to the wall above the bed.
/
Part 2: Sakura House, Combine, Office
The confined available space of my room at Sakura House was not a real problem. In the very beginning, I did not bring many belongings with me anyway: a large military duffle bag stuffed with my clothes, a metal case with my cameras, another suitcase with electronics and my laptop.
Life at the Gaijin house was a bit like camping and I honestly liked my room with its little wild garden that smelled of herbs in hot summer nights, while the Cicadas were screaming their mating songs into the moonlight lit scenery outside my sliding door. It even proved to be a good place for making love, as it was not unlike a little hidden cave, right in the middle of the biggest Metropolis in the world. It was a romantic place, an artist’s hideout, a good place to write poems, which I would have written if I could write poems. I rather took photos.
It wasn’t a good place for working though. I got some photo jobs for commercial clients to keep myself alive, some of the jobs were really big for high-profile companies like Swiss private banks who needed images for advertising. In the beginning, I worked at my computer at the little camping table in my room, but soon this got bothersome.
Luckily and soon enough, I made contacts with some creatively minded people like myself and we consequently became good friends. They invited me to join a newly founded shared office space in the fashion district of Aoyama. The building was owned by a French woman in her 40ies who ran an exclusive jewelry store on the ground floor, while our office was on the third. As the most hyped high-fashion district of Tokyo the area was extremely expensive, the real estate prices probably among the highest in the world, but the woman liked to support artists and creatives, so the rent was not only affordable but even cheap.
I spent my days working hard at the office that we aptly named just “3RD FLOOR”. In my breaks, I could go smoking on the rooftop of the house and enjoy the view all over Aoyama. In the evenings I would usually go out with friends for dinner into an Izakaya ( = a Japanese drinking hall, also serving cheap food). The late nights were spent on parties all over town or at one of my favorite bars. The only time I would spend in my room at Sakura House was when I needed to sleep or when I felt too sick to get out.
/
My by far favorite spot to go for a drink was the neo-bohemian Combine, close to Nakameguro Station, situated directly at the Meguro River. I was going there so often that I considered it to be my living room, while in return the staff began considering me to be part of their furniture. The space was basically built just like a huge concrete shoebox 12x5 meter in size, 4 meters high, a large bookshelf filled with art books on the left side, a concrete bar and a DJ-desk on the other, in between chairs and tables and some sofas, outside the window the concrete bank of the Meguro-River. When Cherry-Blossom was in full bloom you had an amazing view onto the Sakura trees out of the very large window that extended over the whole front side of the space.
Combine’s clientele was a mixture of 50% creatively working gaijins from all over the world, with the other half of visitors being Japanese who did not find their place in ‘normal’ Japanese society, because they were artists, musicians or just freaks in general.
We drank a lot, we talked all night, we danced on tables, we kissed, and we fell drunkenly from the bar-stools quite frequently.
From 4 am everybody at Combine was usually so wasted that no one could stand straight anymore, people dancing in ecstasy on a make-shift dance-floor of pushed-aside chairs and tables, sitting in the sofas and smoking joints made from temple-weed, or talking for hours at the bar, the sparkle of diamonds in their eyes, while outside the window myriads of pink Sakura-blossoms would be showering down into the river-bed of the Meguro-gawa, that was bathed in the dawning light of the early morning. When it was good then everything about Combine was pure magic: then every single moment was the most important moment of your life and every person you talked to was the most important person you’ve ever met.
Sometimes I passed out on the sofa in the early morning, only to wake up later in the daytime, surrounded by middle-aged ladies with their lap dogs who frequented this place around noon to meet and have some coffee and cake. They would look at me from their tables as if I was an alien from another planet, and I would stretch myself, wash my face in the washroom’s sink, and order a coffee and a carrot cake as well — for breakfast.
Everyone I’ve met at that space at night was becoming not only my friend but a family member after some time.
I even met a girl that wanted to stay with me in my tiny room at Sakura House. I found her sleeping on a sofa of a minimal-house-music party that was organized by a handful of gaijins who worked for Sony. The girl was a punk and I instantly fell in love with her mohawk, I photographed her napping on the couch and then took her home with me.
Her name was “Ai” 愛 which translates to “Love” and also “Indigo”. She was also quite small, so that was a good fit for my space. Like a cat she was coming and going whenever it pleased her. After some time I amicably started calling her Ai-chan, which is the diminutive of her name, making it sound even more loveable. Everything was perfect.
There are a lot of stories to tell about my time at Sakura House, but this is neither the right place nor the right time. In the end, after nearly three years of living there, I got thrown out without further notice because my next-door neighbor had complained about me to the real estate company. She was a German girl I have never even had met. Allegedly I had been making too much noise when one afternoon I had cleared and replanted that tiny patch of garden in an effort to bring some order into the green chaos in front of our porch. I had sown sunflower seeds but then I had to leave before I could see them growing.
/
Without a place to sleep, I stayed for several days on my best Japanese friend Taeji’s sofa, then switched to my other best American friend Vicente’s kitchen floor. After all, that room-sharing had become too tedious for everyone involved I decided to sleep on top of the long wooden work-table at my shared office space in Aoyama. It was not very comfortable but with my sleeping bag it was not impossible to sleep on it.
There was a hand-wide gap in the middle of the table with electrical power outlets inside, that I needed to cover with some cardboard so as not to get electrocuted at night. The table was also mounted on small industrial wheels and easily moveable, so I would sometimes wake up at another location in the office than when I went to bed. It made me feel like Little Nemo in his flying bed and I had weird dreams at that time. The single most important thing was that I woke up before anyone else was coming to the office in the morning, otherwise I would have risked some slightly embarrassing questions by my colleagues.
/
Part 3: Internet Cafe
Sometimes, when I could afford it, I rented a small private box at an internet cafe in Shibuya. There I could sleep in front of a computer, which was much more comfortable than it sounds. The Internet Cafe “Bagus” was situated in a bland business building on the Center Gai ( = Central Road) of Shibuya. I would take an elevator to the 6th floor and I could choose from several kinds of computer-equipped boxes that I could rent: one kind of box would have a reclining chair inside, another one a flat cushioned floor, there was a special box for gamer-couples and another even bigger one for groups. The whole thing was advertised for gaming and internet surfing and not for sleeping, but for sure everybody, including the staff, knew that people who visited after 12 am wouldn’t come for the advertised “All Night Gaming Package” to play World of Warcraft until 6 am.
For an Internet Cafe, it was quite decent if not outright luxurious. The whole space was thoroughly kept in black, from the furniture to the soft carpets, and smelled of artificial Vanilla-scent. There was an extensive library of games, movies on DVDs, and Mangas that one could take for free, as well as a shower-room one could rent. There was a row of machines that served hot soups and beverages, as well as hot snacks like French Fries that were miraculously freshly prepared inside the machine. There even was — and that was the best thing ever — a self-service soft-ice machine where you could take an unlimited amount of chocolate ice cream for free!
“This is the future!” I thought to myself while filling my cone.
There were rows after rows of black boxes, each with its own number. It was not very private though: the boxes were open on the top, just so high that one could have had a glimpse inside when standing on one’s toes. The saloon-like doors were kept shut with simple magnets but couldn’t be locked, and there was a foot-wide gap between the lower end of the door and the floor. I always booked the “flat-cushioned floor” instead of the “reclining chair”-option, it had proven to be much more comfortable. The whole box was basically just a big black mattress made from artificial black leather with walls around it and a computer monitor on a board, and I could just lay down there in my sleeping bag, my legs beneath the board, while still being able to surf the internet. There was a simple cushion provided in each box that I positioned in the way to close the gap in the door to get some more privacy.
Laying there I would eat a lot of chocolate ice cream and watch American TV shows like „Breaking Bad“ on the computer until I passed out while being surrounded by soothing Jazz-music from hidden loudspeakers, the muted white noise of the air conditioning, and the suppressed squeaking of Japanese teenagers who rented the adjacent boxes mainly for making out and shagging because they had no other place to go.
/
Part 4: Nakameguro Haimu #302
In the meantime, Ai had moved back to her parents’ place outside of Tokyo in Chiba, 1 1/2 hours away from Shibuya and we couldn’t meet often. After some weeks of being quasi homeless, with a lot of effort and research, we could finally find a real estate agent that was willing to rent a ‘normal’ apartment to us, under the condition that Ai-chan was giving her signature as the main-tenant.
I loved the apartment that we found. It was just a hundred meters away from the Gaijin house and compared to my old room it was with 37sqm quite luxuriously spaced. It wasn’t in the newest building in the block, but it was clean and simple, with a clear modernist style, kept in white and a blueish-grey for all doors and furnishing. Last, not least it was relatively cheap for this area. We signed the contract as fast as we could.
We also soon found an offer for some used but good-as-new furniture on an internet message board. The guy from India who was selling worked in some highly-payed job in the telecommunication business. He had just stayed for a couple of months and was leaving Tokyo for another position in his company somewhere else in the world. He wanted to get rid of all his recently bought furniture as quickly as possible, so we bought everything he had: a huge king-sized bed, a man-sized fridge, table and chairs, plates and cutlery, even a bean-bag. It was all by Muji, one of my favorite brands, it looked brand-new, and we paid not even 10% of what we would have paid for it in the shop.
Our apartment was on the second floor of an apartment building that was appropriately — with me being originally from Germany — named with the pseudo-German moniker “Nakameguro Haimu”, meaning “Nakameguro Home”. You would enter through a grey metal door with number #302 into our small kitchen, there was our man-sized fridge and a sink and a simple top-loading washing machine. To the left of the entrance was a tiny bathroom with an even tinier bathtub and toilet inside. It was so confined that we got used to calling it “the space capsule“ because it reminded us of the washing facilities one could find on a space station. When you were in the bathtub and a smaller quake would move the house it would feel as if you´re reentering earth’s atmosphere after a trip through space.
In front of the kitchen window, on the opposite corner to the entrance, was a small table with four chairs and next to the table two big wooden sliding walls that were as wide as the room and separated the kitchen space from the adjacent bedroom. The bedroom behind the sliding walls was on the corner of the building and it had big windows on the two sides that were facing the streets outside, and a lot of storage space behind another pair of sliding doors. There was our huge king-size Muji-bed that nearly filled the whole room, it was probably bigger than the complete space that I had available in the gaijin-house.
When we had friends visiting — which happened frequently — and there were more guests in the kitchen than chairs, we would just open the sliding wall and use the bed like a sofa, which was really practical. We would sit on our bed and at the kitchen table at the same time.
The one thing that I loved most about the apartment was the windows. All of them were frosted, and only when you slid them open you could look down to the main street Komazawa Dori on one side, and on the other side you’d look into a small alleyway, and a huge constantly humming silver-metallic electric power-converter, with colored cables coming out of it on all sides, sticking on a pole. The power unit was so close by the window that I could nearly touch its vibrating metallic body.
On the opposite side of Komazawa-Dori was the modern Happa Gallery and behind that a shady lane that led to a small magic neighborhood shrine. It was surrounded by a sandy park with a playground for kids, it was a meeting place for dozens of stray cats at night.
Right next to our house was one of the biggest and most modern photo studios in Tokyo: Studio Fobos. Fobos had a sign on top of the building that shone its neon light onto the rooftop of our building that was three floors beneath. I did wonder why they named the studio after the Greek god Phobos, the personification of horror, fear, and panic, but I did not give a second thought to it.
Suddenly Aichan and I had our own apartment, with comparatively lots of space, after sharing my little room in the Gaijin-house, which was barely big enough for two people to stand upright at the same time.
/
Part 5: A Very Big Bird
One afternoon, pretty soon after we had moved in, I wanted to take a bath. I had already opened the tap and stood in front of the big shelved storage-space, that was built behind another pair of sliding doors. Aichan was working noisily at the kitchen counter and the traffic on Komazawa Dori was humming from outside. I grabbed some clothes that I intended to wear later and while going back into the ‚space capsule‘ I saw — out of the corner of my eye — a huge shadow passing by the windows out to Komazawa Dori.
„What a huge bird that must be!“ I remember thinking to myself.
Some birds were indeed quite big in Japan, much bigger than in my home country Germany, and close by in the small park behind the shrine there were always murders of humungous crows gathering, waiting to steal food from the stray cats.
I got undressed and stepped into the tub. The bathtub was so small that I could not even stretch my legs, but it was comfortable enough and quite relaxing. I was reading some articles on my phone when I heard frantic sirens from outside, not from one car as usual, but from many cars.
„What’s the fuss in the street?“ I called out to Aichan in the kitchen. „I don’t know! Probably just fire-fighters from the station nearby!“. She was probably right and the sirens vanished soon after.
We had planned to go out after my bath to make some errands, so after some more washing and scrubbing I got dressed and we stepped out of the apartment. Most of the time we just left the door unlocked, the idea was that friends who were in the area could just go inside and make themselves a coffee even if we were not at home. No one would ever steal from us, so it was not important for us to lock the door.
When we stepped outside into the street there was an emergency-car and police. A firefighter stood there with a hose and cleaned the street right in front of our house. We stepped over the trickle of water that swept down the curb.
Aichan approached one policeman who was busy taking notes and asked what had happened. He explained that a woman who lived two floors above our apartment has had a fight with her husband. She had subsequently jumped from the rooftop and was killed on impact. They would visit us in the next days for questioning.
We left for our errands. „In the window, I had seen the shadow of her falling body.“ I told her.
We did not exchange many more words.
The next day in the early evening, I went up to the rooftop. It was a simple, flat, and nearly square rooftop with a big water tower in the middle and a drying rag for clothes. The roof had grey metal handrails all around its edges. One had an amazing view over the rooftops down to Meguro in the East, Yutenji to the West, and Nakameguro Station to the North.
I found a couple of cigarette butts right in the corner of the rooftop, three floors above the windows of my bedroom, right where the woman must have jumped. Dried red lipstick had imprinted the structure of the woman’s lips around the white filter parts of her last cigarettes. One of them was obviously only smoked for one or two puffs before it was resolutely put off, the cigarette was broken in the middle.
I stepped into the corner and looked down onto the street, my upper body hanging across the railing. 6 floors below I could see the dented street sign at the corner of the small street that cut our house at the outer wall of our bedroom. She must have smoked her last cigarette, finishing it after just some nervous drags, then she must have climbed across the handrail. She probably stood there for a second, on the other side of the banister, on the ledge of the roof, holding firmly onto the grey steel. What went through her head? Did she sigh when she loosened her grip onto the handrails? What did she think when she was falling? Did she regret her decision?
Whatever she was thinking, it was a very quick end: she fell directly on top of the triangular-shaped street sign. She must have been dead immediately.
Some hours before in the afternoon, we had met the still visibly shocked employee who was working in the lamp-shop on ground-level… When she saw us passing by her shop she quickly — but cautiously — came out through the back door and hushed us to come to her.
She spoke in a muted pressed voice when she was telling us the details, her eyes had unusual deep dark rings around them, she obviously had not been sleeping well the night before.
She told us what she had seen through the windows from inside her little shop: she heard the impact of the body hitting the street-sign, that was right in front of her shop window. Startled, she looked up from her desk, saw the body splitting in full length, and — once it was opened by the sharply edged metal sign like a plump ziplock-bag — spilling its contents across the boardwalk and street, coloring the windows of her shop with blood.
She saw it all happening while being surrounded by hundreds of hanging lampshades and chandeliers, like in a fake crystal palace made from rhinestone.
/
I was starring into the abyss in front of me. While leaning over the banister I let my center of balance slowly shift towards my upper body. Released from carrying the weight of my body my feet were tip-toeing, barely touching the floor.
What was it like, I thought…
I pushed myself back onto the roof, away from the banister. I took a deep breath, then I lit a cigarette. It was getting dark already. Black silhouettes of crows were circling the little shrine, backlit by the gradient hues of the sunset skies above Nakameguro. With the cracking sound of electronic discharge, the neons of the studio building next door flickered on, to shine their light nervously onto the building’s signage above me.
It read: FOBOS.
/
FIN
