In my Florida encounter with Tony Sloan and his makeshift red delivery truck parked on the edge of the supermarket parking lot to the magazine story about American skaters traveling to Japan, I discovered a cultural sweep already eddying around me. A different force steered me to southern Tokyo in the summer of 2005: the academic demand of preliminary fieldwork. I had a clear focus, one that defied the vagaries of drift, to see how feasible it would be to study Japanese skateboarders and their lives in recession-afflicted Japan. In my imagination the study would build on Dick Hebdige’s famous work on subcultures and follow in a genealogy of recent work around globalized cultural forms, particularly hip hop. The formula had been refined in the late 1990s when the microcosm of youth practices and spaces traced a delicate web of networks and relays along the underside of massive and valorized systems like music industries, movie production, and advertising and their attendant services in legal, translation, marketing, etc. A particular set of youth would constitute an old-fashioned field site, the perimeter for study marked off and the young subjects’ own modes of encounter, consumption, and interpretation would provide the filtering tissue between the local and the vaunted global. How can we productively imagine drift in rescaling and disorienting our conceptual, political, and cultural frames around young people? More specifically, how can a drifting sense of space, such as the Pacific Rim, help bring us into contact with fragments to compose a becoming-assemblage of Japanese youth amidst cultural drift?
DIY Skate Spots
Two local skaters I’d encountered had shown me a partially secluded DIY skate spot built along a seawall and next to a Tokyo Metropolitan Government water treatment plant. The spot interrupted a simple asphalt walking path that stretched along the wall and was close enough to Haneda Junior High School that during the sweltering summer day one could see students toiling in their stuffy classrooms or leaning from windows, watching us. From the seawall we could watch planes arriving and departing from Haneda airport, one of Japan’s oldest airports. The spot was incongruously located next to the huge sewage plant and old school building—both critical institutions in maintaining the city’s population—and across from the eerily flat airfields shimmering in mid-summer heat as barges and rusted harbor craft plied the estuary between with grunting diesel engines in contrast to the steady roar of the jets arcing between far-away cities. So many flows converged and passed by and overhead while we skaters rode back and forth on a small mini half-pipe or rode up the rough, vertical seawall on a bit of illegally poured concrete shaped into smooth, curving transition.  

The skaters kept the place tidy. Empty plastic bottles and cans were thrown into several garbage bags hung from the chain link fence surrounding the sewage plant. But the spot was haphazard with various obstacles built from scavenged wood and stolen sheet metal signs, all arranged along a 30-yard length of path where it widened. Neighbors using the path had to navigate the splintered, unsightly plywood trick boxes and small ramps and even a dilapidated couch found dumped one day and incorporated into a lounge area alongside the half-pipe. The skaters’ temporary interruption of the space hardly seemed to matter; the skaters had strategically located their spot in an area long ceded to heavy industry and a layer of black soot coated all the concrete work in the area. It was only meters from the dead-end road on which the school, sewage plant and a number of airline warehouses and machine sheds stood and beyond that, the area held numerous small factories and metal shops. Clanking, grinding, the whine and groan of engines provided a steady background noise to our own small cacophony of boards clacking and wheels vibrating over the rough asphalt.

The space held together a different kind of sociality for the young people who gathered there. It was far from the expensive, trendy flash of clubs in Shinjuku and Shibuya. All of the skaters who regularly hung out at the spot lived nearby and most worked in difficult manual labor jobs. A scruffy, deeply-tanned skater in his mid-20s, who called himself Spitfire after a famous skateboard wheel company, would skate in his work clothes of baggy tobi trousers traditionally worn by construction workers and a dirty t-shirt. Others would bike up after their shifts ended and change out of work uniforms, stripping down to boxers with a casual disregard for any polite public convention towards modesty. If a stray pedestrian or cyclist should pass, they would often bow comically in an ironic gesture to a society that held little power here. Away from the bustling shopping districts, lost at the very edge of Japan’s old manufacturing zones, the skaters would drift together in this provisional, ramshackle space to enjoy a few evening hours skating under buzzing streetlights. Across the water, the airport’s lights winked more brightly as the light faded. A cooling breeze stirred, carrying the thrum of river traffic to us as we sipped green tea and beer one of the guys had brought from a nearby convenience store. One skater rolled a joint and it was quietly passed around with watchful care for anyone strolling up the path.

The DIY spot was special. Though it had been through several transformations over the two years or so it had been around, it felt durable in the way its obstacles showed signs of hard use and in the familiarity of the group of working class young men (and a few women) who regularly skated there and the affinity they shared with the older skaters who would come on weekends, sometimes with their elementary-aged kids who would also ride.

Signs of Japan’s industrial capacity surrounded the spot. The river barges carried shipping containers down to freighters in the bay. Flights, carrying passengers and cargo, arrived endlessly from unknown destinations at Haneda Airport right across from us. The speed of Tokyo and its connection to the globe was plentifully evident. As anomalous as the skate spot appeared, it too was globally connected, though not in such obvious, structural ways as those around us.

On a hot, late afternoon I was soaked with sweat as I paused to greet Spitfire who’d just arrived. He began skating and then abruptly came back to me, as if he’d just remembered something. “Hey, you lived in Iwate-ken before, right?” he asked. I nodded, confirming I’d lived in the far northern prefecture for two years a decade earlier. “Ha, yeah, that’s right!” he bellowed. Sweat glistened in his thin, scraggly beard. “That kid over there lived in Iwate too!” He swung his arm towards the far end of the spot where two younger guys in their late teens were practicing tricks. “Hey, this guy lived in Iwate!” Spitfire shouted at them and they dutifully skated over to us and stood a bit awkwardly at Spitfire’s brusque summons. Spitfire gestured grandly at one kid, apparently the Iwate native, and seemed very pleased with himself at having brought us together with our shared connection to Iwate—remote, rural, sparsely populated, poor, but celebrated for its folk culture. Politely I asked, “What town are you from?” “Kitakami,” the kid replied quietly, his head down in an unusually deferential manner. “Really? Kitakami?” I exclaimed in surprise. Iwate is one of the northern three prefectures comprising the Tohoku region and while not remote by US standards, it was a distant backwater to Tokyo residents and seemed like a quaint relic of a previous Japan so far removed was the area from Japan’s everyday life. The city I’d lived in was small and while on the bullet train line direct to Tokyo and thus not exactly isolated from the capital, meeting someone randomly who was from Kitakami here, in this strange, secrete skate spot, seemed a very unusual coincidence.

The kid nodded a quick yes as I nearly shouted, unable to mask my excited, “I lived in Kitakami too!”

“I know,” he mumbled, finally looking up a bit, “because you taught me English at Ueno Junior High School when I was a first and second year student.”

“I DON’T BELIEVE THIS!” Spitfire yelped and danced backwards on one foot, contorted and whirling to demonstrate his level of disbelief. I was completely thunderstruck as the kid’s friend laughed maniacally behind him, doubling over. Other kids gathered around us. Spitfire crazily and with much embellishment recounted the unlikely story of the shy kid and the American with the fucked-up ankle who were once student and teacher. “Guzen da,” a kid breathed. “Total chance.”

After the wild eruption had calmed, I learned that Tetsuya had indeed been a student in one of the four junior high schools I’d taught at when I worked as an assistant language teacher for the Kitakami Board of Education from 1995 to 97. He pointed down at my left calf. “That’s the city crest of Kitakami tattoo you got while you lived there. Some kids heard you got tattooed in America when you went home for a visit. I don’t know how they knew what the tattoo was because no one ever saw it, but everyone knew you had the crest. It was so cool.” After graduating from the city’s vocational school, he’d moved down to Tokyo to work since “there are no jobs anywhere up there. For anybody.”  

Now he worked in a small plant nearby, making engine components in a dirty factory alongside other rural Japanese as well as Indians, Sri Lankans, and Brazilian-Japanese. He lived in the company dorm so it was necessary to come here, he told me, so he wouldn’t suffocate. We squatted in the shade of the seawall, watching the other skaters. I asked how long he’d been skating. “Ever since you lived in Kitakami. We saw you skating one time behind the train station by yourself. As soon as I could afford a skateboard I bought one and started riding. Me and my friends started skating because of you.”

Skateboarding had become a shared, embodied practice for Tetsuya and I, bringing us back into unexpected and improbable contact after our first years spent together a few times a month in his middle school classroom so far from Tokyo. The DIY space in Haneda drew us together through the power of its geography—on the edge of daily life.

Introducing an ethnographic scene so full of Japan’s fading industrial power and then folding down into a moment of suspiciously easy cosmic charm is compelling but perhaps also distracting. The joins and hinges of history are mobile. They connect like this: I moved to Japan in 1995 to understand how a society so different from the U.S. contended with consumer capitalism. I specifically asked to be placed in a rural location for my teaching assignment, in an attempt to experience Japan not from its techno-future centers but from its sparse periphery. The school district officials were not very happy a tattooed punk had been sent to them and they insisted I wear bandage wrap around my forearm to cover a visible tattoo, a decision that immediately attracted attention from nearly every student I initially encountered. Hiro, a skater who had lived briefly in L.A. with a cousin and now worked as a landscaper, befriended me and regularly took me to his mother’s noodle shop for dinner. On weekend nights I’d join the other skaters at the parking lot in front of the train station, across from the lone department store, and ride small jump ramps they pulled out of the bushes nearby. Other kids would show up in cars with massive sound systems and bang hip hop while crews of teenage dancers rehearsed their breakdance moves, using the dept. store windows as mirrors. While Tetsuya was not necessarily a young witness to these improvisational uses of space and the discontents of his older peers in the city, he inherited its streets after many of them moved away for work. Hiro’s dad committed suicide and his mom sold the shop, and the whole family moved far to the south. Other guys moved to Sendai, the largest nearby city. Others followed a migratory circuit carved deeply into rural Japan during the nation’s period of intensive industrialization for empire in the 1920’s. A few more moved north to Mizasawa, the town adjacent to a U.S. air base, where they could find contract work and live on the perimeter of another global network—the U.S. military—through which bodies circulated and culture drifted.

I had become an inadvertent precursor agent for my own research. A form of myself had contributed, through performance and contact, to the drift bringing Tetsuya into this heterotopic zone of the skate spot so he could get some air and hang out with friends before returning to the stifling routine of his dorm and factory. The practice of skateboarding was the “concrete and specific” of our becomings: I had returned to Japan ten years later uncertain about the viability and worth of a research project on skateboarding and global flow and Tetsuya had come to Tokyo to find work but also to skate in the massive metropolis, to find sociality and pleasure gone scarce in his hometown.

Sure, there are “pure” economic reasons in both our journeys and traceable histories of globalization legible in our movements from the depopulation and lack of good jobs in Iwate for locals and the rare government job for a foreigner to teach English as a remainder from Japan’s heady period of growth and aspirations for an “international” population. My contract was coldly and politely not renewed after my second year. Perhaps because I unwittingly contributed to the wrong kind of cultural drift among local Japanese youth, though the breakdowns and failures were arguably not in the train station parking lot on Saturday nights but in the capitalist devaluation and strain of the Bubble collapse and the intensification of rural Japan’s chronic underdevelopment. Tetsuya left as soon as he could, taking with him his love of skateboarding and the streets. His practiced sensitivity to body and space led him to discover the DIY skate spot in a way similar to how I’d found it—through other skaters, from being in the streets enough to find others in a shared becoming. The reunion between Tetsuya and I is funny and uncanny. How could I have imagined I would’ve transmitted the practice of skateboarding to a kid who would then, unbelievably, become my subject triangulating questions of young masculinity, austere economic opportunity, and urban practices from which embodied pleasure and sociality was extracted? Even then, back in Iwate prefecture, transmission was only in the most ineffable of ways, as sign, as possibility. From a California youth practice, skateboarding had folded me into its divergent drifts and became, with Tetsuya, “a component in a series of flows and breaks, of varying speeds and intensities” shaping our lives. Our meeting in Haneda is a small instance of convergent speeds and velocity. It is not enough to just dismiss this encounter as awesome coincidence. The social and spatial power of skateboarding worked into our imaginaries and our bodies in ways so profound we discovered one another again in the chaos of the streets we’d come to expect. There is always possibility and old lines of connection made new.

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