Screen Time, Take 15: Tokyo Story
My great grandfather “Bud” Wilbur gave his son Jack an Erector Set one Christmas then took it back the same day. The Erector Set was a children’s toy made of metal pieces that allowed kids to build various model structures like bridges and poorly made bridges. Before video games, children had very few choices for entertainment: marbles, Erector Sets, or becoming a Peeping Tom. Those were the choices. My grandpa Jack was going to be an engineer like his father, and to seal his fate, great grandpa Bud bought him the tools to try his hand at building. Bud, seeing the pieces scattered on the floor must have thought “pearls before swine” while having his eureka moment. Using the toy he had bought his son, he built a model of what he called The Simultaneous Calculator, what the American papers in 1937 called “Robot-Einstein,” and what the Japanese dubbed “The Wilbur Machine.”
He didn’t build the first calculator. I believe that honor technically belongs to the Mesopotamians who made the first abacus. Nor did the calculator conceptually resemble the digital computing systems we have now that employ ones and zeros and a lot of electricity. The Wilbur Machine was an analog computing system with pulleys and brass bars that solved 9 equations simultaneously (or 9x9 systems according to an MIT grad’s thesis that I can only comprehend up to page 4). Math equations that once took a full day to solve now took roughly 1-3 hours. It sped up the production of large structures, power grids, and for one country it seems, planes. It was a big advancement in 1936-37, an advancement that was eclipsed by better smaller machines soon after. In the United States, that is. In Japan, a 3x3 system Wilbur Machine was replicated in the late 30s and a fully functioning 9x9 calculator was completed in 1944 at the Tokyo Imperial University’s Aviation Laboratory.
You read that correctly. My great-grandfather Bud Wilbur built a machine that was stolen by an Axis power right before World War II. Japan continued to use the machine until the war’s end. So, uh…sorry about that? It wasn’t Bud’s intention.
Before you also think I’m living off calculator money, Bud did not found Texas Instruments. I’m writing this essay from the LIRR, not from my third home in Oahu. In fact, knowing who got the most use out of The Wilbur Machine, I don’t think I’m comfortable visiting one particular spot in Oahu.
Not only did I not inherit TS-83 calculator wealth, but I also did not inherit any of the paternal Wilburs' penchant for engineering. Instead, I am genetically more aligned with the member of my paternal forefathers who sat on the jury for and acquitted Lizzie Borden. If you don’t know, a jury of 12 men decided a woman who killed her parents with an axe was not guilty, partly on the grounds that sweet unmarried Protestant ladies don’t commit crimes. There are children’s rhymes about her guilt. The kids knew, but my great-great-great grandfather did not. The Wilbur men have struggled to understand women ever since but never with such egregious consequences.
Bud Wilbur, his two brothers, my grandfather, and my father all attended MIT. Most of them studied engineering while my dad studied city planning, focusing his God-given engineering brain on righting the past wrongs of urban development and being the rare kind of person who finishes reading The Power Broker. My dad took me to Boston in high school to show me a few schools including his alma mater. I visited Tufts, Amherst, MIT, and, for one wild night spent playing Yahoo Scramble Words while listening to my friend’s older sister insist Natalie Portman was on the same floor, Harvard.
The final leg of the trip was spent in Boston and was extended, to my delight, by a blizzard, leaving my father and me stranded for two nights in our hotel and unable for a full 48 hours to eat anywhere other than — you guessed it — Dunkin Donuts and a fancy Chinese restaurant adjacent to the hotel. We walked in our crewneck sweatshirts and sneakers through a foot of snow for half a city block and arrived at our Chinese spot with our jeans soaked to the knee. My dad and I sat in the front, his back to the giant aquarium in the window by the door, flat fish swimming behind his head, temporarily blocking my view of the streetlamp outside that lit up a steady stream of snow flowing like a waterfall in front of it.
“Are you ready to order?” The waiter asked, noticing we had our menus resting on the table. Neither of us needed to open them by the second of three meals.
I don’t remember anything in particular my dad and I talked about but I got to see him at his most bored. We watched the finale of Joe Millionaire and ate leftovers and Boston Creams. I watched him order an electric eyebrows trimmer for my mom after we’d seen the ad so many times, he memorized the 800 number. I called my football coach to tell him I wouldn’t make Monday’s practice and but that I’d stick to my scheduled workout at the hotel gym. I genuinely tried to keep that promise, but realized when I arrived in the basement, the treadmill and hand weights were not going to help me recreate the 3 sets of power cleans I was supposed to do that morning. So we sat, full of sugar, giddy to squander a few days of a weekend napping and staring out a hotel window rather than doing anything we’d planned. It reminded me of how we spent a few days on another family trip.
An original model of The Wilbur Machine stayed in a hallway at MIT for decades, blocking student and faculty foot traffic until someone stole (or angrily trashed) the giant metal box. Another extant replica appeared years later in Japan and is still on display in the Tokyo Museum of Nature and Science. Seishi Koizumi, a technology writer, contacted my grandfather with a few questions and asked if the family would like to see it. That’s how the Wilburs made it to Tokyo, Japan the summer before my first year of high school.
My parents remember the trip to Tokyo with little romantic nostalgia. When my mom cites 2003’s Lost In Translation as a great representation of her experiences in Japan, she doesn’t simply mean that we also saw the overwhelming throngs of people lit up by bright screens at the Shibuya Crossing. She means that whatever listlessness the jet-lagged characters felt in the movie she felt too. Tokyo is simply too damn big and weird for a person from Versailles, Ohio to visit for only a week. We were there in 2001, a few years before the movie was shot, but we already mimicked the opening act by staring out a window at 12 million people and not sleeping for the first few days of the trip.
Big cities, especially cities where you don’t know anyone, can inspire an oppressive claustrophobic melancholy. Greater Cleveland is one big grid system of streets with roughly a million people in it if you include the suburbs but when walking to your section of Jacob’s Field you might bump into 5-6 friends. In Cleveland, you can softly hear the Cheers theme playing in your head when you enter a bar. Cities like New York and Tokyo have two gears: lonely and busy. Often both at the same time. Don’t get me wrong. You can make friends in cities and over time you can calm down, but being young in a big city has a hustle to it, and the fun you have with your friends is often extreme, taking place in 3-4 locations a night, fueled by alcohol and drugs and the promise of sex. Buzzed on the train ride home my first year living in New York, finally alone for the first time all day, I always felt like weeping. As gregarious as I was, I felt that boxed-in Tokyo feeling: exhausted and surrounded by millions of people I could not talk to.
What’s strange about rewatching Lost in Translation now is that it feels less like a movie with a plot and more like Sofia Coppola filming beautiful scenes about the odd experiences she had in the city. That is indeed how she wrote the screenplay. She jotted down paragraphs while working in Japan, and much of the movie feels like her personal reflections on the city. Those little vignettes are all I’m left with from a short trip decades ago. The movie itself feels like appreciating the memory of those small moments. Audiences saw a bittersweet will-they-or-won’t-they Roman Holiday-esque comedy with scenes sprinkled throughout the film of Scarlett Johansson arranging flowers and looking sad on a bullet train to Kyoto. None of it pushes a story forward but it captures many of the events the Wilbur family experienced for themselves.
I was a tween boy who loved video games and anime. I was overjoyed about the trip. I had always wanted to visit Japan thanks to my cousin Chris’s trips there with his neighbor Kazuo. They always came back with new games to try and regaled me with tales of what fresh cartoon would soon take over my TV. The second I discovered we were going, I tried to teach myself Japanese. On the plane ride over, I read most of Dave Barry Does Japan. When we arrived, I tried to soak up everything I saw and memorize each moment, knowing I’d likely never get to see Tokyo again.
Upon arriving at the hotel, I bought a grape soda from a fridge outside my door. It tasted funny but I figured they must have mixed bitter tea into it. Then I felt buzzed. This was my first experience with hard alcohol. “That won’t help the jet lag.” My mom said after tasting it to find out why it tasted so strange to me. When I asked someone on staff at the hotel about what was in the drink, he only said “White liquor very bad.” and mimed passing out.
I found a free bright orange-and-yellow book of Buddhist sutras with a sunset on the cover sitting in the drawer of a hotel nightstand where a King James Bible would be in America. I brought it home and pretended I was Buddhist for a year or two.
We took a bullet train from Tokyo to Kamakura to see the second-largest bronze Buddha statue. My mom said not to go too far and in an hour, come back to a specific spot, a pole near the impossibly long line of souvenir vendors. My brother, at nearly 6’3” had to duck under every sign in the Tokyo subway all week. In Kamakura, among the crowds of Japanese tourists, he stuck out. We all did. I’d come out of a store, scan the mass of people, and see Mom, Dad, Sean, and Grandpa. All of us would nod like we were spies on a secret mission abroad. We barely broke eye contact during that hour. We walked to the giant Buddha. I can still remember walking inside it and seeing its hollow inside.
I ordered “squid with its entrails” in a restaurant and received a cold mug with a whole dead squid in it. I took a bite. Aside from our visit to the shabu-shabu place where you cook your own thinly sliced meat (Seishi, our guide, “They feed the cows beer to fatten them up”), we left nearly every restaurant hungry.
We made it to a sushi place with pictures of the food on the menu. “Two plates, please.” My dad said pointing at what appeared to be large sweet-and-sour fried chicken breast chunks. We bit into what turned out to be fried “chicken knuckles,” strictly the cartilage from chicken legs. I didn’t mind it. No one else in my family had more than one. Seeing the full plates on the table a half hour later, the waitress said “you’re not Japanese, are you?” She cackled at her own joke and left us to our plates of knuckles.
The Tokyo Hard Rock Cafe was particularly insulting because one appetizer’s worth of chicken fingers looked like two bags of chicken strips from Costco. Is this how much the Japanese thought we ate in one sitting? A person would have to be insane to eat it all. Or they’d have to be tourists who tried to eat chicken knuckles a few hours earlier and were left starving.
Every screen I saw on the street seemed to have Rivers Cuomo singing “Hash Pipe” on it. A Japanese band called The Yellow Monkey was the only one to break up the Weezer monopoly.
I walked past an old man on the street playing what looked like those old TV touch screens at bars with Naked Photo Hunt or whatever proto-version of Bejeweled existed before those games went on our phones. He was connecting colors and numbers on a touchscreen. Above him, where he kept glancing as he played, an enormous screen showed a stuttering video of a naked woman masturbating on top of a bar. The video became smooth and movie-like the better he did at the game. Every mistake he made stopped the video momentarily and people around watching it groaned.
Multiple times my dad asked if I wanted to go to a 24-hour Kabuki theater or a stop on the subway with a large building that only sold Manga. We had likely gotten back from a 4-hour walk through a park. “I can’t do it today” and we all watched a cartoon in Japanese where a bunch of rodents yelled at each other (Hamtaro) and napped.
We went to a mall that supposedly had a 6-floor arcade but was recently converted to a department store that sold women’s clothing. I asked “how much is this dress” in Japanese, and the woman who worked that section leaped in the air, clapping and laughing before letting out a string of words I didn’t understand.
We went to a jazz club where a guy who looked like Weird Al in his thick glasses era was killing it on harmonica.
The city felt safe enough that my brother and I took the subway back to the hotel alone. Of course, that meant we bought beer from the vending machines and drank them as fast as we could outside on the street.
The Nature and Science Museum took photos of the family in front of Bud’s machine. It was a fat lifeless hunk of metal. I pictured absent-minded MIT professors bumping into it in the hallway while walking and reading. No wonder they dismantled the thing. The museum accepted a photo of Bud we brought with us and immediately put the photo on the wall next to the calculator. Someone snapped photos of us for a newspaper.
We were on a boat and groups of teenage girls kept asking to take pictures with us as if we were celebrities. Somewhere there are photos of an exhausted American family surrounded by Japanese girls in their school uniforms holding up peace signs.
Years before it became the standard for everyone on public transit, we stood in silent packed subway cars where everyone, to a person, was staring at a cell phone. I saw two people on the subway who weren’t staring at their phones: an old man reading a pornographic Manga, and a long-haired American guy with a huge green duffle bag who smiled and gave us a thumbs up as he got off the train.
I saw a drunk man in a black suit and tie getting thrown ten feet in the air over and over by a group of men who were all wearing the exact same suit.
No one could articulate how anyone made money on pachinko but we saw people in back alleys behind the parlors loading pink plastic trays of the metal balls back inside.
I called my girlfriend from the lobby of the hotel using a prepaid phone card. I told her about everything I had seen. I described the chochin (paper lanterns) everywhere, the bright signs on the sides of every building. The sleekness of the new skyscrapers that all seemed to disappear every time you entered a park. I told her about the world’s oldest bonsai tree that needed metal supports to keep its limbs in the air. The long flights of stairs at the front of temples. The eclectic architecture. I told her about the wooden houses that had survived earthquakes and the fire bombings, how they still stood next to larger modern high rises. The brand new lighter-sized mp3 players in the Sony building were a short walk from a temple where I watched people bow and clap and throw coins at the altar. She asked if I was attracted to any of the women I had seen.
In Kamakura, I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. We ate sushi and watched people surfing.
This week's rewatch of Lost In Translation reminded me that I probably wouldn’t love the movie if it weren’t for several factors: I had been to Tokyo, I already had several platonic flings that ended bittersweetly as a teenager, and a tired Bill Murray sitting in a hotel in a Kimono reminds me of my dad. I also think often of one of the big scenes at the end of the movie where Charlotte asks Bob Harris the simple question: "Does it get easier?” He assures her it does, but “it gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.”
Kids, more than any invention that might wind up in the wrong hands, are the ultimate project you put into the world and have no idea what the consequences will be. You can plan all you want, but they still might wind up doing something destructive or nothing at all. They might even wind up in the arts if you’re not careful. If you’re a person who wants kids, even if it makes your life harder, I’d assume most people feel fulfilled after giving them a decent life. In that sense, I would hope having kids makes you feel more comfortable in your own skin.
“They turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.”
My grandfather sat at a fancy dining table with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his two grandkids. We were all eating lunch in my grandparents’ assisted living community. It must have been Easter. The place was pulling out all the stops. White linen, multiple courses, mimosas. It was no shabu-shabu but it was lovely. Looking over his progeny, my grandfather could have said “how odd and baffling, how quickly life goes by.” He could have gazed in awe at us all and realized his job was done. I don’t remember the complete details of the lunch, but supposedly he was in rare form. Embittered, sad, and throwing out cruel barbs at me specifically for how I’d turned out at 20. I do remember when he announced to us all that he’d never accomplished anything in his life.
Was his engineering career so humdrum? Was the time he spent with his grandkids not enough? Why couldn’t he take a moment and say “Wow. At least I saw Japan with my family?” Are all Wilbur men destined to feel this irksome anxiety that no matter how much they try, they’ll likely never create another “Robot-Einstein” like Bud did?
It’s an egotistical issue to have, worrying about legacy instead of focusing on how your family feels about you. Grandpa Jack was living in the shadow of a man who built bridges, calculators, and the first wind turbine connected to Vermont’s power grid (it worked until one of the blades flung off and hit a mountain). Meanwhile, we were all living in the shadow of the man who came after, the boy who was sent to boarding school at age 12, a man whose cold relationship with his father the genius never thawed. His Rosebud moment with an Erector Set didn’t make him an angry old man, but I’m sure it didn’t help.
I’m glad I have so many memories of the trip even if I didn’t have the energy for everything we planned to do. It’s important to remember what you saw and what you felt, and to tell an honest story about those moments. If not, you will wind up forgetting what you’ve accomplished and the chance joys you’ve experienced. My family got to visit one of the strangest spots on this Earth, to see a city we never planned to see. For that, I have to thank Bud Wilbur, even if he is the type of person who would steal a child’s Christmas present.
I think you have the right attitude.
My husband wants to take a family trip to Japan, though who knows when we'll be able to do that (he's supposed to plan it out to figure out a general cost so we can save for it). My anxiety means I'm intimidated by big cities, especially if I didn't know the language and it's in an entirely different writing system. I'd like to visit Germany (I speak a Duolingo-enabled small amount, probably enough to get by) because my grandmother was from there, or hell, even just an English-speaking part of Canada (been to Quebec twice, luckily hubs speaks some French because I find it really hard to pronounce - I took Spanish in school).