The sound of laughter, suppressed screams of delighted shock, eager calls, echo down the narrow street from the entrance to K.A.  A polished luxury sedan idles, impressively large, sleek and new amidst the aging neighborhood. A small student climbs out, a tanned father in expensive sports coat casually glancing from the driver’s window, and other parents stand holding the hands of younger siblings.  Kanna-chan, in a well-tailored suit and heels, smiles broadly but sternly hushes the children, holding the door ajar with her hip as she urges them upstairs.   She glances nervously, quickly at the shuttered apartments across the alley.  It's a weekend morning and children have invaded this sleepy intersection, raucously ignoring decorous volume as they chatter in English.  A stylish neighbor rushes homewards, her make-up smeared and coiffed hair undone, perhaps from a night spent in a nearby pleasure district in Shinjuku or Shibuya, likely riding the same train some of these young students arrived on.  She averts her eyes as she presses to the far side of the narrow street and the children take no notice of her. 

Momentarily they and their uncanny foreignness occupy the street almost completely but this temporary disorder worries Kanna, the 35 year-old office manager and chief administrator. She shifts her weight uneasily as I stand next to her, witnessing the Saturday morning arrival ritual. “The neighbors in that apartment,” she leans forward and gestures around the corner to an unseen building, “complained to their landlord and then a real estate agent came by on Wednesday, threatening us because of the noise.  I don’t care though,” she laughingly concludes, “it's a city and these are kids!” The small neighborhood with its Shinto shrine sharing space with an antiquated playground has become the unlikely site for an unstable and unexpected form of Japanese identity produced by children circulated through global corridors of capital.  And Kanna, shaped herself by these flows and translocations, stands in the street, smoothing the noisy, transition of the kids from the public and into the repurposed domestic interior of the school, leaving only the rhythmic, low rumble of the trains to disturb the sleeping neighbors.

This small scene illustrates how the city and the kids are remaking one another, and have been remade by the forces of post-war capitalism. The city itself was massively destroyed by U.S. firebombing during WWII, exceeding even the great damage of the Kanto earthquake of 1923.  By curbing inflation with the implementation of the Dodge Plan (1949) and extensive economic cooperation facilitated by trade treaties with the U.S. government, Tokyo was rebuilt and expanded in an organic process between city officials and neighborhood residents.  The Occupation’s accountants insisted that the US funding for reconstruction in Tokyo be spent repairing and improving transport networks, including the web of train lines reaching out into what was then the western suburbs, but now has become the dense periphery of Shinjuku.

In the mornings when I travel out to Daitabashi, I switch with thousands of other riders at Tokyo’s incredible, gigantic labyrinth station in Shinjuku, a station so vast that its various entrances open to sub-neighborhoods completely different from one another, acquiescing to Donald Ritchie’s somewhat romantic description of Tokyo as a vast collection of disparate villages.  While walking through uniformly white station corridors, heading from one line to another, the city is changing above me.  This change is continuous not only spatially but also temporally as buildings are constantly renovated within and destroyed regularly to make way for new, ingenious applications of architecture built in weirdly shaped lots reminding the city of their feudal and eccentric origins.  This state of permanent transition becomes the source for artist Motoda’s eerie “Neo-ruins” lithographs that depict Tokyo in an apocalyptic aftermath, when the fantasy spaces of Kabuki-cho and Ginza have been exploded and abandoned.  As my train pulls into Shinjuku-eki in the last months of fieldwork, I look down from the train window, out over a thick stretch of track, thick like hair pulled straight, past the shacks and fragile bits of small, pedestrian commerce that still cling to the station’s far edge, and then into nothing.  An impossible thing to behold amid the fierce towers and slender buildings inserted to convert every bit of airspace into usable, saleable surfaces.  There it is though, large enough that I stare for seconds.  There is nothing.  This nothingness is more pronounced by being surrounded by a polite fence that screens this freakish absence from the street-level density but cannot escape my elevated gaze as I hurtle under the steel girders of the station canopy.  The empty lot is the ghost of the city, and the buildings that remain at the edges of demarcation exclaim the absence, as they themselves stand exposed.  Their plumbing and ductwork and heat pumps run and cling up the sheathed walls no one was ever meant to see.  I stare at this wound, imagining even larger swaths of the city razed to only shadows of ash and occasional knots of melted beams and toppled brick, a mutable surface, a palimpsest ready to be reinscribed from the pulsing tissues of the city.  


    Kouta, who has spent most of his eleven years in Queens, NY, marvels at the erasure of buildings in his own neighborhood in Ikebukuro, in an area once devastated by the American bombing.  But when the narrow buildings are temporarily removed, he and his friends scramble through new passages and discover unexpected ways to escape from the main street to the blocks behind. What I see of the city’s changes, the children in our tiny classroom at K.A. also see.  The intensity of surfaces and changes are features of Tokyo that awe them and in their excited descriptions of the city I hear them speaking as if they never knew Tokyo. They talk about Japan as some foreign place. They map Tokyo’s urban sociality onto their experiences elsewhere and in so doing they articulate the spatial specificities of their kikokushijo identities—the repatriated child. Mariko, a shy, small-boned 5th grader says in a class discussion, “The city gets too big for me. How would anybody find me if I missed my stop? I’m always so afraid of falling asleep and the train will just go somewhere forever.” —as they too stare out the windows of the trains racing them through this strange city.  “The train, writes Dagerman, was crammed full, like all trains in Germany, but no one looked out of the windows, and he was identified as a foreigner himself because he looked out” (Sebald 2003, 30).  On the trains the children look out like the foreigners they have become, and watch.  These are mute, careful journeys for them, alone in a city, a thing they have never done before, this solitary movement.  Kouta carried a small hand-drawn map.  On a Saturday morning eight of my 10 year-old students recited their routes aloud, noting intersections and parallels with one another.  

Now they all have cell phones, though they recall in their own deep past a moment when this was not so.  “The train kept stopping and I didn’t know why and then the conductor told us were going straight to a really far station without stopping and I got so scared!” Mami tells me, the remembered panic now a dramatic flourish.  “I asked a man standing next to me if I could borrow his phone and so I called my father and the man rode with me all the way and then waited with me till my dad could come because I had no idea how to get home!”  An earthquake had caused the emergency rerouting of the train, Mami discovered, a new, subterranean danger that could arbitrarily re-route her already perilous journey.  

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