I struggled mightily with coins during my first few days in Japan. My internal currency converter—shoved bleary-eyed and yawning onto the streets of Tokyo—required a brief period of recalibration, during which I found myself in a succession of convenience stores handing over crisp, large-denomination banknotes for even the most trivial of purchases. The resulting flood of small change soon proved too much for my wallet to handle, and by the end of the first weekend, a drawer in my hotel room had taken on the appearance of a veritable dragon’s hoard of 100-yen coins.
Thankfully, Japan’s dense ecosystem of vending machines—the omnipresent streetside booths that dispense cans of coffee in every form a jetlagged traveller or hungover salaryman could wish for—soon enabled me to start putting said hoard to good use. After roughly a week of working my way through the caffeinated branch of Suntory’s business portfolio, I could relax knowing that I was no longer likely to trigger a diplomatic incident due to my unauthorised sequestering of a sizeable portion of the country’s copper resources.
I am now bent on one knee in a covered shopping arcade in the west of the city, wishing I had held on to a few stragglers.
“Shit. 500. Doesn’t look like it takes notes either.”
A late spring salvo of rain rattles the glass roof of the arcade, before sluicing down onto the street outside with a hypnotic hum. I look over my shoulder at my friend.
“Any change on you at all?”
“No luck, sorry. Card only.”
Meanwhile, the third party in this discussion remains utterly silent, tacitly confirming that the price and the means by which it has to be paid are entirely non-negotiable. I stand up and survey the arcade.
“Hang on, I’ll go grab something in that 7-Eleven. See if I can break a note.”
Tokyo is vast. It is typically referred to in English as a city, although its sheer scale and density (14 million residents, a figure that swells by several million during the day as workers commute in from adjacent areas) makes it more akin to a larger Japanese prefecture in itself. This is something reflected in its administrative structure, with a single governor overlooking many smaller municipal governments, each one responsible for managing a specific section of the Tokyo metropolitan area. What we know as “Tokyo”, then, is essentially a collection of several dozen cities that make up one colossal urban landscape. Accordingly, the individual cities within that landscape, and the individual neighbourhoods within those cities, can be drastically different from each other in terms of character and appearance. The well-heeled glamour of Ginza. The towering neon kaleidoscopes of Shibuya. The crimson-soaked nightlife of Shinjuku.
Today, I am in Kōenji. Hip and artistic, with vintage clothing shops and anarchist bars tucked away along the backstreets, Kōenji is a bohemian outpost in western Tokyo with a rebellious streak. When a van full of uyoku dantai — Japanese ultranationalists who make deliberately provocative public broadcasts of historically revisionist propaganda — show up in Kōenji, they are likely to be greeted with hoots of derision. Or, as on one occasion, by a middle-aged hippy on LSD dancing happily away to the van’s broadcast of melodramatic marching music. Not even this nonconformist piece of the great Tokyo puzzle, however, can escape the presence of that most ubiquitous of Japanese convenience stores, the 7-Eleven.
“Irasshaimase!”
The cashiers call out their standard vibrant greeting. They often do this even if they can’t actually see the new customer who just entered; the chime of the automatic door tends to be enough to prompt the chorus. I still haven’t figured out the correct etiquette for responding. I generally settle on a light, wordless bowing of my head.
I briefly think about buying a coffee — thoroughly aware of the irony considering the key role that coffee played in depleting my coin hoard in the first place — but, given that the pluvial symphony unfolding above our heads doesn’t appear to be winding down for an intermission anytime soon, I settle on an umbrella instead. I hand over a 2000-yen note. Quickly confirming that there are enough coins scattered amongst the change to resolve the problem, I pocket them and head back out to the shopping arcade.
The third party in the earlier discussion, the taciturn monolith for whom neither credit card nor banknotes were sufficient, is a Gachapon. Or simply “Gacha”, as they are more often referred to in English. These vending machines, although not as thoroughly widespread as those that dispense life-giving cans of coffee, are nonetheless a common sight in Japanese cities. After entering the necessary number of coins, one manually turns a small crank, and a toy is deposited in the tray in front of the machine. It is this dual action that gives the machines their name: gacha- (an onomatopoeic representation of the sound of the crank turning) and -pon (the sound of the toy hitting the tray).
This one is filled with heroic characters from a popular Japanese television series, particularly beloved by the young man I am on my way to visit. I insert a few 100-yen coins, rotate the crank, and a capsule dutifully clunks down onto the tray. I turn to my friend — the boy’s father — with the capsule and the figure therein in hand.
“Hope he doesn’t have this one already.”
“Ah don’t worry, it’ll be grand in any case. He’ll just be delighted to get something.”
Raising our umbrellas, we set off into the symphony.
*****
I had an easy childhood in every way except one. I was never left wanting for food or clean clothes or a warm bed or new schoolbooks, but the first day of each school year did invariably bring a recurring challenge of its own. Sitting there with my classmates as the teacher conducted the first roll call of the term, glancing up at each response of “Present!” to familiarise themselves with their new group of charges, I knew what was coming.
“Máirtín?” (“Present!”)
“Peadar?” (“Present!”)
“Ronan?” (“Present!”)
“R…”
And then the teacher’s brow would furrow. Their head would tilt. They would lean closer to the page to make sure they were seeing it correctly. And then they would try, some more valiantly than others.
It began with an “R” – that much was certain. Nonetheless, when the time came to finally attempt to speak my name aloud, that initial sound was invariably produced in quite a hesitant manner. Perhaps the speaker was clinging to a final vestige of phonological security, like a diver inching their toes over the edge of the board before plunging headlong into the dark depths of uncharted waters. Sure enough, once that faltering “R” had been fully offered forth and the speaker found themselves in panicked freefall, they would then produce any combination of sounds imaginable in a desperate effort to guide their trajectory. Ronan. Reagan. Ryan.
The final “n” sound, I would have thought, was at least a reliable landing point to aim for, but, as the speaker approached terminal velocity, many of them would flail past it and land off in the hinterlands of some vaguely neighbouring consonant instead. Russell. Reilly. Rory. Raymond.
Even as a child, I found this universal confusion over my name bewildering. It was, after all, ultimately quite easy to pronounce. Just two simple syllables, neither of which contained any sounds outside the purview of the average English speaker. The spelling, particularly the “dh” towering over all else at the midpoint, was admittedly intimidating, but a simple request for clarification would have carried most people over that peak in an instant. Such a request was never forthcoming, at least not in the classrooms of 1990s rural Sligo. My childhood was thus spent with the distinct impression that my name was possessed of some intangible sorcery that drove people mad.
As I left those classrooms behind, I found that this sorcery gradually began to fade. As an adult, people were more prone to enquire about the best way to navigate the unfamiliar consonant pairings and diacritics before taking the plunge off the diving board. I started to hear about other Ruadháns past and present out in the world. A medieval saint who founded the monastery of Lorrha in Tipperary. A writer for a national newspaper. A distant family-friend-of-a-family-friend’s nephew. At some point, I dove into the etymology of the name, confirming that it did indeed mean “red-haired” or “the red one” – a sobriquet that, although once fitting, becomes less and less so for me as the years pass. Along the way, I also learned that said meaning derives from a significantly older Indo-European root word (*h₁rewdʰ-) which has travelled to other branches of the vast linguistic-cultural tree that stretches across much of western Eurasia. The name of the great Rigvedic deity Rudra is typically held to mean “the roarer” or “wild”, but an alternative proposed etymology links it to the Sanskrit rudhirá, also meaning “the red one”. It is thus possible that my nominative brethren and I here in Ireland have a distant cousin in a storm god of Bronze Age India.
I never met another Ruadhán until I was 38.
*****
Tokyo is a city built on rivers. Its original name, Edo, means “bay entrance”, a reference to its location at a convergence point where several notable rivers enter the vast inlet now known as Tokyo Bay. As Edo grew from a scattered series of fishing hamlets to a fortified castle town, and eventually to one of the largest cities in the world, these inland waterways were incorporated into the urban landscape. Early feudal lords expanded certain rivers to make defensive moats and connected others to form water-based highways, and by the 19th-century Tokyo was a city of and on water.
Some of the most famous ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the age, such as Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Nihonbashi [Bridge] in Edo” (c.1830-1834), illustrate the bustling trade that took place along Tokyo’s vast, boulevard-style canals. A Swiss envoy to the city in the 1860s wrote, “Where does one find [Tokyo’s] like in Europe? Only along the banks and in the squares of the Queen of the Adriatic, Venice herself.” In Junichi Saga’s unorthodox biography of a former mob boss, Confessions of a Yakuza (1991), the eponymous figure recounted how, even in the early 20th century, Tokyo’s gangsters still used the canals as the main method of shuttling customers and their illicit earnings to and from underground gambling houses.
This dense network of waterways, so long an integral part of Tokyo life, was to suffer a series of successive blows over subsequent decades. The widespread reconstruction that took place in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and then again post World War II, and particularly the vast urban rejuvenation efforts in advance of the 1964 Olympic Games saw many of Tokyo’s canals, rivers, and streams vanish. Many were built over, banished underground where they still flow silently to this day under layers of ferroconcrete. The famous Shibuya pedestrian crossing, where on average 2.4 million people cross each day — 2,500 people every time the light changes — is directly above the convergence of the Uda and the Shibuya, two of the roughly one hundred subterranean rivers that still flow invisibly under Tokyo.
Many others were simply drained, filled in, and converted into roads. If, as you stroll through a residential area, you notice that the road is meandering in a gently serpentine way, you may in fact be walking along the path of a former river.
At this very moment we are walking along just such a path, the symphony of rain threatening to undo decades of urban planning by resurrecting the road’s former status as a waterway. This neighbourhood is home to a large Nepalese community. I look up and see a flash of colour through the falling sheets of grey; a line of the lung ta prayer flags common in that country and other regions of the world that adhere to the Tibetan form of Buddhism. The last time I had seen flags like that, they had been wrapped around a tree in Siberia.
My friend walks slightly ahead of me, leading the way.
“Just around the corner now. ‘Bout 5 minutes.”
This is the first time we’ve seen each other in over a decade. We had done the same master’s degree for a year in Dublin, after which our paths promptly diverged and brought us to the far opposite ends of Eurasia – Galway then Germany in my case, Tokyo in his. On my first visit to this city in 2013, we had descended upon the northeastern neighbourhood of Kitasenju, a former Edo post town where travellers once stopped for the night before making their way onward into the capital proper, and did a tour of its back alley izakayas and impossibly tiny bars. The kind of places that feel empty with two people in them and overcrowded with five. One of them remained empty apart from us, the boisterous proprietor having recently scared most of his regular customers away by waving around a sword too enthusiastically. My recollections of the evening remain hazy, but I believe I became acquainted with a bottle with a skull on the label at some point.
Several years later, I received a message. My friend and his wife, a Tokyo local through and through, had just had their first child, a boy. While wondering what to call him, they had settled on the idea of using an Irish name to represent that side of his heritage, and somewhere along the way my name had been mentioned. My friend’s wife was immediately enthusiastic. It was striking and different to the Japanese ear, but also — imagine my surprise — easy to pronounce. So it was settled; there would be a young Ruadhán in Tokyo.
We shake the remnants of the rain from our umbrellas. Kicking off my shoes, I cross the threshold into the apartment.
*****
I have never been a great believer in nominative determinism. In the case of my young Tokyo counterpart, it is by all accounts particularly inaccurate. The two kanji characters with which his parents had chosen to write his name in Japanese (瑠, literally meaning “lapis lazuli”, but in a wider sense also the intense tones of blue associated with that stone; and 晏, meaning “calm” or “tranquil”) did little to predict the rambunctious, inquisitive energy he would develop as he settled into the household. More Rudra than any vision of placid blue skies.
Today, however, he is uncharacteristically restrained, having just recently recovered from one of those vaguely defined, 48-hour illnesses that routinely crash over preschools like Hokusai’s great wave. He is back on his feet, but not yet his usual lively self. And as curious as he is to meet this visitor from his father’s homeland, that curiosity is tempered with the shyness that understandably arises from having a towering, tattooed stranger burst into one’s living space, muttering something about the rain he must have brought from Ireland.
I wave and smile. I reach into my jacket pocket and produce the capsule with the tokusatsu figurine inside.
“So, I heard you like these guys, right? Maybe this one can join the rest of the gang?”
Young Ruadhán’s world still does not extend far beyond the walls of his home, and he speaks with his parents entirely in Japanese, so this outpouring of sounds from the distant edges of the world needs to be translated by his father. At which point his eyes light up and he takes the gacha with a quiet “Arigatō…”. I would like to be able to respond in a meaningful way, but one of my few Japanese phrases — “O namae wa?” (“What is your name?”) — would be singularly redundant in this case.
With that, he retreats to his mother’s embrace and contents himself with introducing her to the new arrival as he frees him from his spherical prison. My friend and I sit nearby, conversing for a while over tea. As the cups are gradually emptied, Ruadhán remains blissfully lost in a world of imagination.
*****
We finish our tea. We grab our umbrellas. We follow the ghost of a river back into Edo.
