Sun, May 21, 2006 page9

• To escape the real world, tune out and jack in, Japanese style

  In `infomaniac' Japan, navel-gazing teens and burnt-out salarymen seek shelter from the daily grind in cyber cafes that feature techno-packed personal pods

  • By Virginia Heffernan / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  All cities take a toll, and at times all city dwellers have to take their leave.

  When life in Istanbul gets too stressful, people can head to the baths. In Rio there's the beach.

  In Tokyo, though, the antidote to urban overload is more of the same. In the world's most media-saturated city, people take a break by checking themselves into media immersion pods: warrens cluttered with computers, TVs, video games and every other entertainment of the electronic age.

  The Bagus Gran Cyber Cafes are Tokyo's grand temples of infomania. Situated well above retail level, on the odd floor number where in Manhattan you might find tarot readers or nail salons, these establishments contain row after row of ubiquitous cubicles. At first glance the scene looks office-like, but be warned: these places are dens for Internet addicts.

  The first Gran Cyber Cafe opened in 1999. Today there are 10, serving some 5,000 people a day. Each has a slightly different orientation -- some are geared to teenagers, some to salarymen -- but the atmosphere is the same throughout the franchise. They include equal parts lending library, newsstand, arcade, Kinko's and youth hostel. An inspired extension of the basic Internet cafe, the Gran Cyber Cafes shift their meaning the more you study them, as if by a trick of their trademark low light.

  Sometimes they look like nothing special, only marginally cooler than carrels you might find at a college library. But at other times, especially late at night, they seem visionary, an architectural realization of the social and personal life of the future.

  "The Japanese love liminal spaces and gray zones," explained Con Isshow, a writer who has published widely on youth culture, including a collection of letters by abused children called Letters to Japan's Worst Parents.

  "In both the anonymity and role-playing games on offer at the Gran Cyber Cafe, you don't have to exist in tight social norms," Isshow told me. "Your identity can be in flux. You go to these places not to present yourself, but to lose yourself. Lose your name, your position, your pride."

  Isshow spoke through a translator, but here he introduced some English: "No-face-man, no-ID-man, no-pride-man."

  little runaways

  Although the services offered by Bagus, a company that also runs billiard halls, karaoke dens and spas, are aboveboard, the Gran Cyber Cafes are enshrouded in the urgent, furtive atmosphere of a hot-sheet motel. Eyes averted, customers sign in, head to the library of entertainment options, and load up on fashion magazines, video games and DVDs of 24 as if stocking up on Jim Beam. Then they beetle-brow it to their solitary pods.

  What they do there is up to them. Some people channel-surf. Others trade stocks. You can download music, read novels, watch pornography, play video games, have sex, go to sleep.

  According to Isshow, Japan's "petit iede," or little runaways, come for downtime, free lattes and smoothies, and, at some branches, showers. They use the places as trial separations from home -- staying a few hours, overnight or a few days, long enough to scare their parents (a "night pack" allows use of the pod from 11pm to 8am for about US$10; some places sell toothbrushes and underwear too). Periodically the management will remind a customer that the cafe is not a hotel, but above all Bagus respects people's privacy.

  On a recent afternoon, at around 5:30pm, I visited the Gran Cyber Cafe in the Shinjuku neighborhood for the first time, to read e-mail and visit a news site or two. Checking in, I was assigned to pod 16-A.

  I loved 16-A the instant I saw it. I closed the door, slipped into a low-slung leatherette seat and surveyed the all-you-can-eat tech feast, which includes VHS and DVD players, satellite and regular television, PlayStation 2, Lineage II and a Compaq computer loaded with software, all the relevant downloads and hyper-speedy Internet. In the nearby library were thousands of comic books, magazines and novels. On the desk was a menu of oddball snacks, like boiled egg curry and hot sandwich tuna.

  The atmosphere is airless and hot, with a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke. Overall the effect is of a low-wattage, low-oxygen casino.

  When I spoke to Japanese cultural critics about the Gran Cyber Cafes, most gave high-flown theoretical accounts of their appeal. But Takami Yasuda, a professor at the School of Informatics and Sciences at Nagoya University who writes about virtual reality, shrugged.

  "I do not know exactly why people, young guys in particular, love to stay in such a dark place," he said.

  I don't know exactly why I stayed either. But 10 books, two DVDs, seven magazines, two newspapers and a video game later, I found that eight hours had elapsed.

  On my second visit I brought Shizu Yuasa, a married 31-year-old Japanese friend who stays overnight at Gran Cyber Cafes whenever she wants time to herself.

  Shizu, the director of 2DK, an arts and media production company, is an avid reader of the Japanese graphic novels known as manga. But because she can read one in about 15 minutes, she doesn't believe in buying them. So she heads to the Bagus shelves and picks out 20 or so.

  Around 8pm the place filled up with a reticent and largely male crowd of loners. One nameless man told me he comes on breaks from work, to read the sports news. Naomi Iwasaki, a 28-year-old manager of an Internet portal site, said he was there to read manga. Two boys with hair dyed strawberry blond companionably watched their screens: one was tuned to a cooking show, the other to Yahoo.

  Back in the stacks I met Reiko Ishii, a 25-year-old student at Hosei University who lives with her parents in Tokyo. She had hair colored like tea, wore a horn-shaped amulet around her neck, and dressed in the clingy style of early Nicole Richie.

  She told me she comes to Bagus often, but I was the only other customer she had ever spoken to. There are so few places, she said, where a woman can go out alone, late at night, without having to be sociable. I asked if she'd ever spent the night.

  "Sure," she said, looking unfazed. "My parents know I stay here, and it's fine with them."

  She retreated to her pod. I went to mine too, hit the button that changed the keyboard to English entry, and answered some e-mail.

  Shizu was catching up on manga. One was The Monetary System of Osaka, a left-wing chronicle of graft and usury among the suits of Japan's second city. Another was Inu, (or "Dog") by Haruko Kashiwagi. It's considered clever, fairly high-toned and mainstream, which is surprising because, in part, it's about a woman who has sex with her dog.

  The extensive manga library also includes pornography for every taste. But sex at the Gran Cyber Cafe is not just in the fiction. All around me, couples were making out. Some were watching sex videos. They seemed blase. Still, in the cubicles that seat two, the walls are a little lower, and the seats don't have a massage option.

  Meanwhile other customers have taken a more professional approach. The Japanese Web site Tanteifile.com published an article about a freelance prostitute -- a "delivery health" girl -- who moved into a Gran Cyber Cafe after her workplace was raided.

  Shizu and I got tea and calpis, a sweet, summery drink, and returned to our pod. I leafed through teenage fashion magazines while a Japanese movie about gay samurai, Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san, played. Shizu, in the meantime, checked out Mixi, the Japanese Friendster (a Friendster is an online networking service).

  becoming nobody

  Some people, I had been told, use the site to communicate with other customers who might be just a few pods away, to communicate without having to introduce themselves in person.

  Finally an attractive couple in their 30s, Kaori Karasawa and Naoya Ohada, settled in the pod across from us.

  "Will this article be on the Internet?" Karasawa asked me. "People at the office don't really know we're dating."

  "But now they will," Ohada said, laughing.

  He appeared eager to impress her; he held forth about manga, while she listened. They Googled subjects that came up in conversation, showing each other favorite sites, using the Internet as a kind of third party in their relationship: chaperon, entertainment, common ground. Over their pod the light at the Gran Cyber Cafe seemed not dim but soft, flattering, romantic.

  Checking out wasn't going to be easy. I had come to appreciate the shared solitude the Gran Cyber Cafe provides, as well as the fast, infallible Internet connection.

  Hidenori Kimura, a sociologist who writes about intercultural encounters, said he believes the Gran Cyber Cafes fulfill a deep and persistent cultural longing. The Japanese system of competition for education, career and social esteem, Kimura explained, forces young people to obsess over self-presentation, which costs them both fantasy and anonymity, the privileges of childhood. What Japanese young people want, in his view, are opportunities to be free of their social status.

  "Traditionally," he explained, "tea ceremonies and festivals have been fulfilling this role of depriving people of their social status and thus help them become `nobody.' Tea ceremonies deprived the feudal elites of their status and made them just a person enjoying tea, while festivals among farmers offered an enclave of anarchy during the festivals where they were free of norms and rules of feudal eras."

  The Gran Cyber Cafes now serve this purpose, he said.

  "Nobody cares what you do, which enables you to be absorbed in whatever fantasy you want to indulge in through Net surfing, Web games or manga. Yet you can satisfy your timid desire to belong," he said.

  Staying in the Gran Cyber Cafes, he concluded, is now part of jibun-sagashi, or the search for the true self.

  Nevertheless there's something a little shameful about spending a solo hour, or two, or seven, on a wanton media bender. It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the IQ than regular marijuana use.

  But, as I read about the study in my pod, I came to doubt that such warnings would ever make people temper their infomaniac ways. The craving for media sprees runs deep, and, like so many Internet-era developments, Gran Cyber Cafes seem to answer an almost carnal need for uninterrupted access to pixels and screens and Web sites and instant-messaging and iTunes.

  And when that need is satisfied, you can always return to life in the city, at least for a while.
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