Half a Month in Naniwa
Prologue | You Said You Came from Osaka
I went to Osaka because of the Expo. To be honest, because its mascot was so strange. Red and blue, a misshapen body with a dozen eyes: the first time I saw it, I genuinely thought it was a parody. It turned out to be the official mascot.
I can’t quite explain the feeling. Not “how cute” or “how bizarre,” but the unease of laughing at something until you suddenly realize it isn’t a joke. It’s real.
So I looked up Expo 2025 Osaka: aerial photographs of the construction site, news of exploding budgets, the Grand Roof Ring the internet had almost memed to death.
Suddenly, I wanted very badly to go.
Not because I had illusions about world expos in globalization’s late age. I wanted to see how a supposedly proper event, entrusted to some of humanity’s finest elites, actually worked. Or whether it could still work at all.
Or whether it would quietly die in full view of everyone.
I had heard “Osaka” countless times without trying to understand it. Tokyo, Osaka. Tokyo, Osaka.
Yes, Osaka could only follow Tokyo. A city gazed upon from above, defined, packaged, consumed.
“Osaka people are funny! They make takoyaki, and there are lots of comedians.”
“Shinsaibashi is great for shopping. The takoyaki is good, and it’s a little cheaper than Tokyo.”
“Osaka people are friendly. They’ll offer you directions.”
I grew up hearing this. As though the state had issued a standard personality to everyone in Osaka. Like all subordinates, they live within an identity script for others to watch and consume: friendly, warm, unpretentious, funny. Because they aren’t Tokyo people. Tokyo doesn’t need a disobedient Osaka.
Tokyo never needs to be warm. It is aloof, standardized, indifferent without apology. It needn’t please anyone. It represents Japan itself.
And Osaka? Who cares?
Sometimes I think of Tianjin. Not Beijing, not Shanghai. Another port city with a history of finance, foreign concessions, and modern urban prosperity. More importantly, another supporting character beside the capital. Who remembers the old glory of the industrial trio Shanghai, Qingdao, and Tianjin?
Mention Tianjin now and people say its residents talk funny, its comedians perform xiangsheng, its old men dive into rivers. There is almost no essential difference between that and Osaka’s humor and takoyaki.
Turning a city into a joke is a process of stripping away politics and history. The dominant city gazes at you, names you, incorporates you. You become a vessel for ease, friendliness, entertainment. Your agency disappears; your blade grows dull. Nobody will remember you.
Tokyo looks at Osaka as Beijing looks at Tianjin: not as a city, but as a functional presence.
You must be funny, warm, proactive, plain, harmless, smiling. If you aren’t funny, who will play the capital’s foil?
Who will cover up the naked violence?
One passage from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window stayed with me from childhood:
“I came from Osaka.”
“Osaka?” Totto-chan repeated, her voice especially high.
Her uncle lifted her up. “Let me show you Osaka.”
She blinked and strained to see, but never did.
Only later did I learn that Tetsuko Kuroyanagi was from Tokyo.
However hard Totto-chan blinked, she couldn’t see it. Readers wouldn’t really ask where that city was either.
A strange thought came to me. If I hadn’t looked up the mascot, if I hadn’t been unable to sleep that day… if it hadn’t had so many eyes…
Perhaps I too could have gone on pretending I saw nothing.
I didn’t know what I’d come for. Tourism? To see the mascot’s absurdity firsthand? Or simply to see what a city really looked like?
Not in a variety show, a tweet, or a travel guide. By walking into it with my body, looking with my eyes, sitting on its subway, eating rice balls outside a convenience store. To know this wasn’t a symbol or a template, some hollow sign, but a real, chaotic Osaka where people lived.
I | Landing Outside the Map
Before landing, I kept savoring the sound of an old name: Naniwa. Osaka’s ancient name, written with characters for waves and flowers, waves and speed, or the difficult bay. Different spellings, the same sound. Naniwa.
Naniwazu ni
Saku ya kono hana
Fuyugomori
Ima wa harube to
Saku ya kono hana
At Naniwa harbor,
These flowers bloom—
After winter’s shelter,
Now that spring has come,
These flowers bloom.
Unfortunately, I had come at the wrong time. Spring’s flowers had already faded.
Beside the window, I watched the dense containers, runways, and jet bridges amid the sea below. Watched Osaka descend from the air onto paper.
Then the plane landed at Kansai International Airport.
Standing in the long immigration corridor, I smelled a little disinfectant, as though it were covering something that shouldn’t be there.
The airport wasn’t on the mainland, but on an artificial island in Osaka Bay. I’d read about it: it was built offshore not for technological innovation, but to “avoid social conflict.” More plainly: to avoid another Narita Airport.
I remember first seeing “Narita Airport struggle” on Wikipedia. I clicked through to blurry black-and-white photographs. The people looked less like protesters than neighbors, old women from the fields, uncles in work clothes. They held banners in forceful Chinese characters:
STOP THE AIRPORT.
Behind them were dense ranks of riot police and a row of bulldozers.
Later, while casually searching for sights near Narita, I was recommended a “Memorial to Police Officers Killed in the Line of Duty.” The map showed it really was near the airport.
My scalp suddenly prickled. This wasn’t metaphor, literature, structural analysis, or something the phrase “machinery of violence” could contain.
Those who died on this flight path weren’t only police officers. Not only the heroes whose polished stones read “killed in the line of duty.”
People had really died, and never returned.
Their blood entered the runway asphalt, flattened and compacted with their bones.
The rice they planted and houses they built had been declared obstacles to modernization and cut away in one stroke.
After they vanished, the country kept taking off as if every sacrifice made perfect sense.
Ah, modernity is always so efficient.
They died without names, were broken without monuments. The state machine swallowed their bodies; development’s concrete buried them. Even GPS couldn’t find their locations.
“Your name is unknown. Your deed is immortal.”
Really?
If only it were true.
Perhaps even spring has forgotten where the flowers that never bloomed once grew.
II | If You Are Innocent, Why Must You Prove It?
“Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”
—Romans 3:20
I handed over my passport. An identity code appeared on the screen: “C.” I joined the C line.
A middle-aged man was told to remove his mask and retake his photograph. A Korean girl was questioned repeatedly because she’d changed her hairstyle. Everyone surrendered fingerprints, pressed their hands down. Nobody argued or protested. Everything looked orderly.
Everyone obeyed the order.
Foucault once said:
“People are much freer than they feel.”
Reversed, it seems more accurate:
People have been tamed into obedience far earlier than they realize.
Is this really how it should be?
I remember clearly: passports have not always existed. They became a true institution after 1914.
In the aftermath of the First World War, countries began restricting borders and requiring permits. The Paris Passport Conference of 1920 even specified thirty-two pages and printing in at least two official languages, fitting a new global order: unregulated cross-border movement would be considered dangerous.
Sadly, the design made in the name of order did not end with war.
After World War I, borders and standardized passports controlled refugees and non-citizens. After World War II, the new order firmly entrenched them.
But in practice?
Not everyone can move. Not every passport works. Globalization isn’t about where you can go, but what you must accept.
Can you travel abroad? Yes.
But you need English, a visa, access to ways of seeing the world. You must be a pillar of society: a suited office worker, middle class, with a tax number, education, savings, and spending potential. You mustn’t be too poor or have nothing to do.
You mustn’t carry a Quixotic dream of beginning a new life.
Before them, all you can do is prove your innocence.
The airport becomes a filter. Refugees in worn clothing with nowhere to go are stopped. People from “sensitive countries” are questioned separately. People who opposed a country’s policies online enter watchlists.
And we think this is normal.
We say:
“It’s fine. We are going abroad, after all.”
We say:
“As long as we get through.”
We say:
“They have their difficulties too.”
Whose safety? Whose country? Who defines normal?
We have lived in the dream so long that we believe a room which can expel us at any moment embodies civilization.
Like the campus rules of that later “special period”: no nonessential outings, comprehensive silence, travel-code and health-code checks. Every phrase sounded reasonable and gentle, as if taking responsibility for your life.
That was when I truly felt afraid.
Not because I couldn’t leave campus, but because leaving required a reason, walking required an application, breathing required gratitude.
You queue, give fingerprints, accept sorting. Finally you say:
“At least I can travel abroad. I’m lucky.”
I finally stepped through the door. I knew this wasn’t freedom. Still, we had come in.
I looked down at the landing-permission sticker:
15 Days
I had not been chosen by God. I was a temporarily exempted sinner, belonging nowhere here, only tolerated for a while.
I lowered my head and surrendered my eyes, voice, and past movements as if receiving pardon. Really, I simply hadn’t been exiled yet.
“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads.”
—Revelation 13:16
III | Beneath the Wheels
I boarded the subway and traveled south on the Midosuji Line.
Few passengers were beside me. Everyone looked down at a phone, no different from any afternoon in Tokyo, Beijing, or Shanghai.
The announcement said “Nishinakajima-Minamigata.” A mouthful, though that wasn’t what interested me.
I was thinking about the weathered traces at the entrance.
This station was built in 1964. That same year, something much larger quietly happened:
The Shinkansen opened.
Shinji Sogō, president of Japanese National Railways. Nobody mentions that name anymore.
Construction formally began on April 20, 1959.
They said: make the trains run.
They didn’t say what it would cost.
By 1963, the money was gone and the railway only half built. Parliament was furious; the Finance Ministry scrutinized the budget. He acted as though nothing was wrong, knowing that admitting it would end everything.
He lied and was forced to resign. The project barely held at history’s cliff edge.
Then politics took over.
Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda, who had announced the Income Doubling Plan, understood that this was not a railway but the nation’s fate. Stopping would collapse Japan’s credibility. The government gritted its teeth, found extra funds, and pushed this national artery all the way to Tokyo.
Sogō wasn’t invited to opening day. He had been asked to leave.
At home, he watched television images of trains racing at 210 kilometers per hour.
He died of pneumonia in 1981 at a JNR hospital in Shibuya, aged ninety-seven, reaching his destination more slowly than any train.
Who cares about a forgotten man?
The media celebrated. The people cheered. The future seemed to lie beneath their feet.
Tokyo Olympics, 1964. Osaka Expo, 1970.
People genuinely believed technology was justice and concrete could save a nation. Shinkansen, highways, mountains cut open: newspapers printed “economic miracle.” GDP was national dignity; development was the hard truth.
Haven’t you heard those slogans in another country?
In 1980, Deng Xiaoping visited Japan. As staff carefully described the high-speed railway’s miracle aboard the Shinkansen, the old man with the Sichuan accent said only:
“All I felt was speed, as if something were urging us to run.”
Fast.
One simple word.
From that moment, it became China’s national incantation for the next half-century.
We must be fast too! We must not fall behind!
Fast meant Shenzhen speed, the infrastructure-building machine, Beijing to Shanghai in only four hours.
Fast meant the Liu Zhijun era, high-speed rail climbing from drawings onto the land overnight, and the slogan:
“Achieve leapfrog development of the railways.”
The rails climbed mountains, crossed rivers and deserts, bored through frozen earth. The Railway Ministry became the country’s largest asset holder. Wherever rails went, GDP soared.
For those years, China’s annual growth stayed in double digits. Ten, eleven, twelve percent. Growth was an addiction. Slow down and die.
A vast country ran as though possessed.
But it ran too fast. In 2011, a high-speed train collision in Wenzhou killed forty people.
Liu Zhijun fell, charged with corruption.
Yet it wasn’t he who was crushed. It was the workers who could never speak again. The rail lines forced to slow. The maglev dream that died halfway. Millions of railway employees whose silence paid for restructuring.
Migrant workers became expendable bricks and tiles. Cities became exhibitions of glass facades and property advertisements. Ordinary people became domestic demand waiting to expand.
Nobody asked why we were building, for whom, or where it would end.
We knew only that failing to build meant falling behind, and falling behind meant being beaten. So we built and built, constructing a country to display to ourselves as a dream.
I sat on the Midosuji Line watching stations recede: Shin-Osaka, Umeda, Shinsaibashi, Namba…
Like strata of time. I was an archaeologist digging out modernity’s bones.
This was more than transport. It was the logic of the state, the circuitry of power, a road that had swallowed millions of bodies, desires, and futures.
We thought we were taking a train. Really, the state was carrying us, running its faith in speed on our lives.
Who slowed down? Who died? Who was pinned beneath the tracks and never rose?
It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that the train cannot stop.
Look, it really is running.
But are you still aboard?
IV | Beneath the Tower, No New World
I got off at Dōbutsuen-mae, “in front of the zoo.” A station name out of a picture book, but Shinsekai above ground felt nothing like a fantasy.
“New World.”
A name so confident it was almost excessive. One glance told you it was no longer new.
Instead, it had a peculiar Showa feeling: takoyaki, souvenir shops, nothing that interested me. Everything seemed copied from travel brochures around the country, a nation repeatedly performing its imagined common people’s culture.
Walking along, I looked up and saw the tower.
Tsūtenkaku.
It stood abruptly, like a stiff nail driven into the city’s flesh. Neither imposing nor magnificent, but inexplicably odd.
Something dropped in my stomach. It shouldn’t be here.
Yet there it stood, unyieldingly rigid.
I read about it afterward.
The first Tsūtenkaku, built in 1912, imitated the Eiffel Tower, with an Arc de Triomphe-like base and a whole Westernized district around it. A product of Taisho romanticism, an urban fantasy following imperial victory.
It was destroyed in wartime fire.
Rebuilt after the war, it became taller, straighter, rougher. A symbol of economic revival, a defeated nation’s monument to getting an erection again.
It was never merely an observation tower for residents, but an instrument of symbolism, a monument to unfinished ambition. Something thrust above a poor district, sealing tragedy away in the name of hope.
Beneath it I saw a familiar, unfamiliar figure.
Billiken. That strange god of good luck.
Bald head, smiling face, enormous ears and feet. Sitting like some cartoon alien while tourists gathered to rub his soles for luck.
A chill passed through me.
Rubbing his feet seemed harmless, funny, relaxed. Yet I saw a nakedly sexualized ritual: bowing your head and waist, approaching the margins of his body. Not his eyes or hands, but his soles. Caring nothing for who he was, only whether you could extract good fortune.
He didn’t speak or refuse. But he kept looking, enjoying your submission.
And then?
The Great Hanshin Earthquake came in 1995. Kobe’s port was paralyzed. Highways collapsed.
The bubble burst, banks failed, factories laid off workers, foreign capital fled. Would stagnation last only thirty years?
Nobody could say.
And Tsūtenkaku?
It did nothing. It could do nothing.
It was no lighthouse, power pylon, shelter, or broadcasting facility.
Only a pillar unable to become hard or soft, standing while the city collapsed and people died.
It saved nobody, said nothing, brought no luck.
It left only a ridiculous open-mouthed smile and soles rubbed bare by tourists.
That was its true face.
Standing below the tower and those polished feet, I suddenly wanted to laugh.
Not because it was funny, but because it was absurd.
A symbol cannot support suffering. A nation’s illusion can be stripped bare by one earthquake.
A few steps farther south lies Nishinari, the city’s real underbelly.
Beneath blue tarps is a street kingdom of homeless people. Unemployed old men linger outside bento shops. No tower, no god, no luck. Only two-hundred-yen udon and the cries of fried-skewer vendors.
Before reality, Tsūtenkaku had already lost completely.
But they wouldn’t admit it.
So they said: this is the New World.
V | Modernity in Ruins
I went to Kobe, first to the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial.
Before entering, we silently queued at ticket machines. Uniformed staff nearby looked like student volunteers just out of class. The first film showed streets on the morning after the quake: derailed trains, shattered roof tiles, smoking roads, residents wrapped in quilts warming themselves beside burning barrels. No narration, only wind through rubble.
I stood motionless while a corner of something inside me collapsed.
Not war or an external enemy, but the city’s own fracture. A sudden shaking of earth and sky tore apart people’s faith in the metropolis.
Another film showed orderly tents, signs reading “Rebuilding Lives,” and a soothing male NHK voice, as if speaking for the rationality of the state.
Could rationality rebuild every fallen house? I didn’t know.
Leaving the memorial, I headed north up the slope to Kitano’s foreign residences.
Foreigners had settled here after the Meiji Restoration: red-brick Western houses, little clock towers, European railings.
In the imagination of the 1920s, Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto formed a whole, among Japan’s first regions to encounter capitalism, industrialization, and colonial networks. A model of East Asian modernity: trams, electric lights, running water, banks, trading houses, Western clothes, dance halls, Ashiya villas, Semba spinning mills, Umeda department stores.
Japan had just endured the Great Kanto Earthquake. Tokyo burned to ash; Kansai rose. Osaka briefly became Japan’s largest city, surpassing Tokyo in port traffic, industrial output, and population. They called it the Greater Osaka era.
In Greater Osaka’s dream, Kobe was the port, the gateway, the future.
Modernity here wasn’t simply physical speed, order, and progress, but an emotional structure. It promised prosperity, safety, cleanliness, efficiency—if you submitted, if you believed.
At 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, none of it held.
The city collapsed. Roads broke, water stopped, fires burned all day. Central Kobe was almost destroyed. More than six thousand people died beneath their own homes.
That was not simply a natural disaster.
Earthquakes are indiscriminate. Death is sociological.
One tremor shattered modernity’s illusion.
I remembered the twisted train cab displayed at the memorial, once among Hanshin Electric Railway’s most advanced models. Now it lay like bent sheet metal behind glass, with photographs of collapsed highway bridges behind it.
Things that had symbolized progress were left silent.
Cities have no power to heal themselves. Generations of hands must slowly smooth the rubble, fill the roads, swallow the pain.
Our lives continue from such worlds, forcibly restarted.
If an earthquake can destroy modernity, what about a pandemic?
I remember a story.
She was trapped at Shanghai Pudong Airport for fifty-six days. No hotel would take her; flights were suspended; no transport could bring her home. She lived on convenience-store instant noodles, sat in the terminal by day, and slept in a corner of the restroom at night.
She said it wasn’t being stranded. It was a legal expulsion. The state did not drive you out, but offered no place to remain. She became a by-product of modernity running idle, an unclassified existence: neither passenger nor resident, patient nor suspect. Only an undefined body.
Another person walked twenty-three kilometers for a PCR test before his green health code expired because no ride-hailing driver would take him. Drivers feared receiving yellow codes and being unable to return home themselves. Every technical network—health codes, appointments, travel records, district lockdowns—served not people, but control over people.
A few days later came a stranger story. Shut outside a checkpoint at the city’s edge, someone walked around Taihu Lake to get home. Seven hundred kilometers, like bodily penance.
They sound like fables, but they happened. The year was 2022. The places were streets familiar to you and me.
Was the earthquake the exception? No. The pandemic was modernity’s true earthquake: invisible, normalized, administered through technology.
It destroyed not houses, but our faith in order.
Convenience stores, subways, food deliveries, parcels, hospitals, schools, social platforms: what you thought were freedom’s infrastructure became boundaries, filters, invisible barbed wire. You queued, scanned, had your temperature taken, surrendered test results, travel histories, facial features, addresses, identity numbers.
Then asked: who am I?
Passports, visas, IDs, health codes had all been for your own good. That day, you understood: you were no longer a person, but a movable unit, a number judged worthy or unworthy of passage, a risk-bearing body graded by technology.
A pandemic could take your freedom, and you still had to give thanks. A yellow code could keep you from home, and you still had to express understanding.
Still you believed it was for everyone.
I watched the train enter Osaka. Tracks lengthened beneath me; the city expanded ahead. Yet everything seemed to contract.
Not bodies, but the boundaries of being human. Not national borders, but the thin membrane of trust between us and institutions.
It had broken.
Convenience stores remained open. High-speed trains kept running. Subway announcements still said Nishinakajima-Minamigata. Billiken still sat beneath Tsūtenkaku, smiling at everyone who rubbed his feet.
But I knew it all operated not for us, but to preserve an already hollow shell.
Modernity had collapsed. We remained inside it,
living on like ghosts.
VI | You Are What You Eat
At the Expo souvenir shop, I stared at an excessively cute little box. A cat’s back was printed on it, with the words:
Nyanko Baum in KANAZAWA
Noto salted caramel flavor, made with Wajima sea salt
At first I only thought it cute. Then my eyes caught Noto salt and Wajima sea salt, and stopped.
Noto: the place just struck by an earthquake, swallowed by seawater, a wound whose numbers kept changing in news alerts.
But it wasn’t treated as a wound. It became a flavor, a marketing phrase beside a cat’s tail.
Where did that salt come from? Who dried it?
Which fisherman, which salt field, which reconstruction recovered it? Nobody told me.
What I swallowed wasn’t caramel or sea salt. It was the illusion the state offered:
“This is good.”
“This is regional revitalization.”
“This supports the disaster area.”
I began noticing it everywhere. “Domestic rice” in every Yoshinoya window. “Domestic tea leaves” on drink bottles. “Direct from local producers” in the supermarket’s most prominent spot.
As if local production alone deserved confidence, pride, trust.
Who decided domestic meant trustworthy?
Japan’s local-production-for-local-consumption policies have run for decades. School lunches, workplace cafeterias, convenience-store bentos all label their origins. This isn’t transparency, but cultural governance.
It tells you: your body belongs to this country. You should eat what this country raises.
You think you are choosing food. You are choosing belonging.
No different from Korea’s sinto buri, the inseparability of body and soil, or slogans familiar to us: domestic means healthy; foreign food means unpatriotic; imports mean worshiping foreigners. Boycott American beef, oppose ractopamine pork, beware GM crops…
Like that cat-shaped treat, you buy it smiling, thinking you support disaster survivors. Really, you join a silent ritual: bowing to the state’s illusion of redistribution, accepting that happiness can be built by eating local specialties, believing the country still has ability, plans, residual warmth.
But what about Wajima’s salt? Did it really come from that devastated place? Can those who lost homes rebuild because you ate this cake?
We stopped believing in the state long ago, yet still eat the illusions it feeds us.
Cat desserts, domestic rice, domestic chips: every commodity wrapped in national symbols is a gentle command.
It isn’t fierce like police or hard like institutions. It is sweet, cute, reassuring: “Eat. It’s fine. You don’t have to do that other thing.”
It never asks whether you’re hungry. It only fears you’ll wake up.
Looking at the cat treat, I suddenly shivered.
It smiles and meows while you chew and savor it, making you forget that violence originally tasted of sea, salt, pain.
Not caramel. Not tender words.
An undisguised knife.
Should I eat it?
For a moment, I had no answer.
VII | Not in My Name
I saw the stamp cabinet in a tourist souvenir shop.
“Can you find your name?” announced the sign. Neat compartments held English-name stamps rendered in kanji: Emily, Tom, Ann, Alex…
Beneath each were three or four red characters. Emily: 利恵美. Tom: 富夢. Alex: 悠久太寿.
I stared for a long time. Not amused, but sad. This wasn’t translation, naming, or writing. It was encoding: stuffing living names from different cultures into the gaps of another system, fitting superficial syllables into meaningless packaging.
Like speech recognition hearing “home” and writing 喉母, “throat-mother.” Almost right, entirely wrong.
I thought of Anglo-American culture’s strange fascinations with the East.
Hippies in patterned shawls, taking LSD, chanting mispronounced Sanskrit through hallucinations, speaking of Eastern spirituality and Himalayan mystery.
Had they truly understood anything? They needed exotic material, a fantasy to replace capitalism’s emptiness. A sticker over the hole in their souls.
The East was a sticker collection to tear from at will.
More ironically, the ethnic-minority performances I watched as a child were the same thing.
People photographed Miao girls singing and smiled at Dai dances. The performers had to dance, smile, perform ethnicity, never tire, complain, or feel anything real.
Their purpose was to please the mainstream and fulfill a national picture of harmonious diversity.
It wasn’t their dance. It was movement assigned by the state.
Looking at those stamped names, I remembered a museum panel in Osaka listing ancient imperial names.
Not modern names like Akihito or Naruhito, but fragments of incantations stripped of meaning and even reliable pronunciation:
天之冬衣開斗隅命, 彥火火出見尊, 饒速日命, 宇摩志麻遅命…
Before that wall, I felt fear down to my bones.
Neither Japanese nor Chinese, but remains of a long-extinct sound system. Perhaps indigenous Kyushu voices, distant Ainu kin, Northeast Asian ancestors vanished into ice and snow. And now?
Wrapped in Chinese characters, edited by the imperial system into mythology, made part of the Age of the Gods. Cultural remains we can look at but no longer speak.
That sense of a language extinguished beyond retelling hurts most deeply.
Like Hokkaido’s place names: Tomakomai, Kushiro, Noboribetsu. Not Japanese in origin, but Ainu.
I thought too of names farther west: Xuyi, Suqian, Pizhou, Junan, Jurong…
Their characters look antique and elegant, yet are fragments of Dongyi languages roughly transcribed into Chinese.
Wuxi doesn’t simply mean “no tin.” Gusu isn’t merely a rearrangement of familiar Chinese words.
When civilization’s conquerors arrived, they declared the words too barbarous, not elegant enough, in need of meaningful characters.
Sounds were bent; meanings refined.
We call it cultural fusion. It is language murder.
Not translation, but replacement.
Standing there, I almost cried.
We had lost more than a language. We had lost another possibility.
Their words, gods, mother tongues, grammar, rhythms, spells were swallowed by civilization, along with their faces, epics, refusals.
Nobody knows their language family, deities, sentence structures. They died so completely that even their names no longer belonged to them.
I thought of Babel. Humanity spoke different tongues, civilizations developed separately.
But some never gave up. “We will rebuild the Tower of Babel!”
How? By wrenching letters from European phonetic systems, tearing languages apart and kneading them together, calling it internationalism, fashion, progress.
Whose language was it, finally? A language of European Latin letters.
Is the world only the land west of the Dnieper?
“Not in my name,” they say: American Jews answering Israel’s killing, drawing a fracture between ethnic identity and state violence.
I think it is what every replaced language would say:
Not in my name.
Don’t stamp with my name or speak with my voice. Don’t build cities from my bones or rename me after death as part of you.
They aren’t 利恵美, 富夢, or 悠久太寿. They have their own languages. You simply won’t listen.
Looking at the stamps, I cried inwardly:
Not in my name.
VIII | A Bus That Will Not Come
I first saw “Tokushima” in the Expo’s Kansai pavilion. Not in news or history, but in a corner of a colorful folding map:
Tokushima—beside the Seto Inland Sea, home to the world’s largest whirlpools.
I stared at the name. Tokushima? Never heard of it. Beside the polished familiarity of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, it seemed unfamiliar, blurred, peripheral.
Back at the hotel, I learned something: Tokushima had no electrified railway.
It struck like an electric shock.
A place marked as a city on the map didn’t even have electric trains. Could such a place count as modern? Carrying that prejudice, I bought a ticket and forced myself onto a bus to Tokushima.
I arrived.
At dusk, backpack on, I stepped into the empty station. No electric trains, no flashing LED transfer screens. Only a small station building and a bus that had just left.
Without checking the timetable, I sat beneath the stop sign and drifted.
Only when the cold wind made me hunch my shoulders did I realize the next bus was thirty minutes away.
Those thirty minutes felt less like waiting than a reckoning.
In Tokyo, missing a train never feels like the world has paused. In Tokushima, each missed bus feels like abandonment. No alternative, no plan B, only an empty platform and the darkening sky.
At that moment, I understood:
I had never truly possessed the night.
In Tokyo I could cross Shibuya late, buy a hot drink, run for Shinjuku’s last train. In Osaka I could stare beneath Tsūtenkaku, wander Namba’s underground passages, eat udon outside a station.
But in this city without electrified railways, I was a minor, a girl, an outsider, a slight body.
No car, no guardian, no internet cafe that would admit me, no karaoke room where I could sleep.
Night meant full hotels, silent streets, no public transport.
It wasn’t that I had nowhere to go. I had nowhere I was allowed to go.
Night wasn’t an absence of lights, but an absence of destinations. Not an absence of sound, but an absence of response.
The whole society quietly told me:
You should leave.
I sat in a gap in an institutional calculation.
It wasn’t insufficiently modern. Modernity was precisely this: adult, car-owning, wealthy, with family, and you are free. A girl, alone, young, without spending power, and you shouldn’t appear at night.
The city said it meant no harm. But exclusion without response is more hopeless than malicious refusal.
It doesn’t tell you you’re wrong.
It simply leaves you no way to exist.
Epilogue | The Night I Never Owned
I remembered the C on the immigration screen, the queue, the fifteen-day permission.
I had thought those were merely border rules. Only in Tokushima’s night did I understand: from the beginning, my existence wasn’t legitimate, only tolerated.
Neither guest nor traveler, only a temporarily pardoned sinner.
That night I stayed nowhere.
I sat on the little slope behind the bus stop until dawn.
At daybreak I remembered the cat-shaped sweets labeled Noto sea salt still in my bag. I took one out and bit it.
As salt rushed into my mouth, I felt I had bitten through something. Not sugar, not caramel, but the system wrapped in cuteness, the voice saying, “Eat. This is what safety means.”
I suddenly wanted to cry.
Not because it was salty, but because it sugar-coated a knife and described it with lies.
As I said at the beginning, the nights of this land had never truly belonged to me.
It was time to go.