Swirly World

I leave my capsule early and follow the instructions carefully written on a piece of paper for me by the woman at the ticket information office in Shinjuku the day before. I have to change trains three times to get from Asakusa to Maihama. Three different subway lines, then, in Hachōbori, I change onto the red JR line that takes me to Maihama, where I will be meeting the other GEOS teachers from Higashi-Kansai, our area or “shisha”.

When I arrive, I notice that this station is not only close to the Tokyo Bay Hilton, where today’s inaugural session to the Big Jump special teacher training will be held, but even closer to Tokyo Disney Land. The spacious area in front of the station is full of high school girls with ornate Mickey Mouse ears on their heads. People in casual holiday outfits are streaming out of the station, enjoying burgers and iced oulong tea at Becker’s café, some carrying big paper bags sporting Mickey and friends, full of newly acquired goods from Disney Paradise. I, on the other hand, am wearing a grey skirt suit and cherry blossom pink lipstick and, as usual, constraining tan tights and black shoes with heels. My hair is professionally tied up. I wish I could let it lose and enter into this swirly world that pervades even the space outside Disney land.

I still have two hours until I’m meeting my crew, so I walk across the wide sand-coloured space and past the big fountain and settle at Café Mono. When I order a “sakuratte”, a word composition containing “sakura” and “latte”, I am served a creamy pink concoction in a round white tea cup on a white saucer, crowned with a swirl of white, stiff and fluffy cream, red stripes lining the crown, and a real cherry blossom topping it off. There is roll bread, a type of muffin with a similar looking surface. A mouth watering world. Even the chairs look like pots of recently stirred, creamy honey, excerpts from a tray of freshly baked, smoothly twisted cinnamon buns. The triangular stand-up menu carefully details how to eat roll bread. Carefully separate the ruffled cardboard cup from the edges and – voila – you’ve turned it into a little plate. Everything is ever so convenient in this swirly world. A sweet, swirly world. In a cup, on a plate, on a chair. Everywhere.
Not the vortical swirls of every day misery, of corporate structure and profits and sales I will be sucked into later on, but vertical swirls, rising towards the sky around an invisible, creamy axis that shows only in the end, a pert tip pointing towards the sky, beaming with the constant aim of swirling the world upwards on the invisible, creamy sustenance of hope, imagination, and the effort to realise them.
The café is full of girls, most of them in pairs, waiting for the shopping village to open, gorging themselves on sweet, creamy drinks and swirly roll bread. The windows have patterns in them, and colours, so you can see the world through different shapes, squares, circles, wavy stripes, and the spaces they create together, hugging, crossing, overlapping, intersecting. The sun is shining in, aiding the warm sparkle of elegant, European-looking lamps, white crystal shades, black, ornate fittings. Disney songs flow from the speakers, rendered in bells, like lullabies from a musical box.
But as the end of my sakuratte approaches and I eat the cherry blossom, which breaks the creamy sweetness with its salty taste, I am unpleasantly awoken to the fact that I cannot stay forever in this swirly world. I have to get up and leave, and meet my co-workers from Higashi-Kansai. At least I’m not the only odd one out anymore when my equally suited colleagues arrive and join me outside the gates of Maihama station, most of them new faces, pleasantly asserting their individuality beyond their grey and black suits. We exchange first greetings, small talk getting bigger as we take the monorail train to the Tokyo Bay Hilton. So close to work, we desparately hold on to the Mickey Mouse shaped overhead handles and longingly look at Tokyo Bay through Mickey Mouse shaped windows. There it is, the Tokyo Bay Hilton.