Nobody goes to Tokyo without a dream. Tokyo—complex, multifaceted, and unforgiving—is a city of opportunity. A tempestuous, dynamic vessel for the pleasures, pains, and aspirations of increasingly disillusioned generations. An economic hub powered by throbbing, vibrating, neon circuits of global industry and commerce. From all over Japan and the world, people pour into the city to craft visions of their futures into reality and to build their lives anew.
I went to Tokyo with my own ambitions. When I traveled there for a semester abroad in March , I wanted to investigate what it means to be a brown Indian woman in Japan, and to negotiate the personal and political stakes of power, desire, and sex in its troublingly notorious homogenous and xenophobic national space.
Through my classes, I gained fluency in Japanese, and became invested in understanding the discourses of race that influence contemporary debates on migration, labor, and nationhood in Japan. So the opportunity to experience Tokyo as a South Asian woman—not as a transient expat, but as a full-time student and resident—both terrified and excited me. Areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya—positioned in the global cultural imagination as metonyms for the entire nation—tend to evoke lurid fantasies.
Heavily inked yakuza lurking in cigarette-littered alleyways. Minuscule ramen joints awash with hungry beer-blossomed salarymen returning from work. Host and hostess clubs oozing sequins and sex, recalling in florid technicolor the libidinal economy of the floating world.
But contrary to how it is portrayed, the fever dreamscape is finite. The steady hum of the train, though still audible, seems faint. The youth, color, and rabid cross-culturalism of the center feel, somehow, distant. In Tokyo, there are approximately three foreign residents for every people—compared to 35—40 in megalopolises like New York and London. Since there is, to this day, no comprehensive immigration policy , these migrants often fall victim to abuse and discrimination— without any legal recourse.
