"The 'Sunshine 60' building was completed in 1978. At that time it was said to be the tallest in Asia, but as high-rise buildings have been erected one after another in the past 30 years, these days Sunshine 60 is hardly visible at all. The face of metropolitan Tokyo changes by the minute. Things that were there yesterday are gone today, and what you see today might disappear tomorrow. Welcome to the Hato Bus 'Edo Night Cruise'. I hope that my unskillful guidance will bring back some memories of the past…" Oikawa Mitsuyo joined "Hato Bus" in 1960 and worked for the sightseeing tour company for 35 years. "It’s the first time in 20 years, so I find it hard to articulate properly," she says with a smile, but in fact she narrates in the excellently flowing style of a trained tour guide.
What I'm about to write is not a sightseeing tour report though, but I'd like to introduce what is officially called "Tour Performance 'Tokyo/Olympic'." It’s an experimental "performance" by the "Port B" theatre company of Takayama Akira, who studied choreography methods in Germany. We gathered in the Sugamo Jizo-dori shopping district, nicknamed the "Harajuku for pensioners", boarded a chartered real Hato Bus, and spent a half day crisscrossing the city to visit mainly places that were established for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Oikawa-san participated as an "actress", and the course was different from the "Edo Night Cruise".
Stations of the tour were as follows: Ikebukuro - Takeshita-dori (Harajuku) - Yoyogi National Stadium/Gymnasium - Yoyogi Park (originally the Olympic village) - Budokan - a "secret zone" in Ueno - an "attraction" in Akihabara - Rainbow Bridge - Odaiba - Higashi-Ikebukuro - Nishi-sugamo Arts Factory. The Metropolitan Expressway was extremely crowded, and due to massive traffic jams the tour ended at 9 p.m., and not as planned at 7:30. As we met at 2 p.m., it was a tour of about seven hours in total.
"So how is that different from a sightseeing tour? " you might ask. Well, just believe me, it WAS different. There were "commemorative photos" taken at odd locations, and TV broadcasts of boat races, as participants had to place bets. We got to hear interviews from an MP3 player while walking, and met model scouts and shop owners on Takeshita-dori. The latter interviewed us about our thoughts on the necessity of surveillance cameras. "There are actually more people living here than you think," we learned, and when looking up I spotted in fact several conventional homes on the upper floors of buildings that accommodate boutique and crepe shops at street level. The "attraction" in Akihabara turned out to be a game arcade, where the gamers explain that they "usually don't spend more than 2,000 yen a day, but it can easily be 20,000 when things heat up" and that "there has to be proper communication that fits the video game environment. " Ueno’s "secret zone" was a Go parlor, and as there probably aren't many tour participants who are familiar with both types of parlors, it doesn't even sound exaggerated to call these places "attraction" and "secret zone".
The most "performance" like parts of the tour were the two moments when taped announcements was played on the bus. The first was aired on the way to Yasukuni Shrine. "Our Hato Bus is now heading straight for the giant torii gate of the Yasukuni Shrine. Taking its name from the pigeon/dove (both "hato" in Japanese), a symbol for peace and speed, our bus is proceeding in a leisurely fashion…" The second announcement came when we arrived back at Sunshine 60: "A 60-story building is scraping the sky where once was the Sugamo Prison, a jail in which 60 prisoners including seven Class-A war criminals have been executed. The neighborhood was reborn in the form of the futuristic 'Sunshine City' that glitters indeed as radiantly as its name suggests, just as if it was trying to light up the gloomy past with a blazing fire…"
The idea behind staging this kind of performance in Tokyo, one of the candidates for the 2016 Olympics, should be easily understandable from the previous lines. "I don't like it when everybody heads in the same direction, and I actually think it’s a rather bad thing," explains Takayama, who worked out and choreographed the spectacle. Nonetheless, the excessive interaction with the audience of his past radical street performances doesn't take place here, so things are not as loud as they apparently used to be (in "hands-on" performances that I unfortunately didn't catch). Instead, what I find remarkable about this time’s project is the point that Takayama utilizes the sightseeing bus as a vehicle for "outsiders" to present the complex layers that make up the monster Tokyo from an insider’s viewpoint. The layers I'm talking about are of course accumulations of history and memory.
I remember chartering a fishing boat to explore Tokyo’s waterways together with some friends a little less than 20 years ago. One of the good things about such boat or bus "tours" is that the change of perspective gives you a dramatically new view of the cityscape one normally isn't aware of. This time’s tour performance came with the additional trick of making participants think about the relationship between seeing and being seen. There is the effect that the "tourists" following the tour guide and her banner attract the attention of passersby, and there is of course the photographer who follows the bus and takes "commemorative snaps" at pivotal points. In each case, the position of the participant is defined somewhere between "spectator" and "actor".
Come to think of it, there once existed the term "theatre town". That’s not about Shakespeare, but about the city as a stage, and the people living in it being the actors. Being reminded of one’s own "acting" in the city, and at the same time watching the city from an audience point of view is a strange but quite agreeable experience. It is, in addition, a nice occasion to realize that the trained skills of experienced bus guides do have their place in the history of entertainment.
Oh, and before I forget, at the end of the tour I received an envelope containing 500 yen. I had won at the boat race!
December "shows" are on 12/2 (Sun), 3 (Mon), 8 (Sat), 9 (Sun), 13 (Thu), 16 (Sun), 19 (Wed) and 23 (Sun). Please visit http://portb.zone.ne.jp/ for details.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO