It was Friday night in Shinjuku, a Tokyo neighborhood famous for neon signs, subterranean shopping malls, and rent-by-the-hour lodgings known as love hotels. In crowded bars, people tipped back beers and sang karaoke. Young men with black jackets and gelled hair stood on street corners, offering menus of available escorts to passersby. In the midst of the action was a store window, covered except for a narrow strip of glass. If you were to have stopped and looked through it, you would have seen something strange: my legs, submerged to the ankles, with six-hundred flesh-eating fish feasting on my feet.
This is the story of how I got there.
Like many people, I approach vacations with a level of preparation appropriate for a medical licensing exam—poring over Internet reviews, reading guidebooks cover to cover, and studying maps so I’m oriented from the moment my plane touches down. I research, I plan, I strategize, transforming my trips into long to-do lists I must conquer in order for them to be judged a success.
This tendency was in full effect during a recent week my husband and I spent on Kauai, when I broke the island into quadrants and made long lists of every activity we should do while “relaxing” in paradise. It was exhausting and, somewhere in the process, I started to ask myself why I was doing this. What was I trying to accomplish? What if, instead of meticulously planning, I were to just show up in a new place and let the experience unfold? By stage-managing every detail, I realized, I was ruining one of the best parts of travel: the adventure.
So I decided to take a different approach. I would go on a trip in which I relinquished control. No guidebook, no Internet research, no list of things to see or do. Instead, I would base all my activities, from where I stayed to what I ate or saw, on the recommendations of strangers. Even the destination would be chosen by someone else.
I started by approaching a woman in the fiction section of a San Francisco bookstore and asking her to tell me the most interesting place she’d ever been. She responded, “I love Tokyo,” and two weeks later, I boarded a flight. I had a map. That was it.
The ambition of this project didn’t fully sink in until the plane took off and I realized I was going to have to ask a stranger where to bunk. At first that made me nervous—aren’t strangers the same people who steal wallets and kidnap children? But then I looked at the passengers around me. A woman in the next row wore a bumblebee neck pillow. The girl in the seat next to me had adorned each long, fake fingernail with a plastic Hello Kitty charm, as if worried a customs agent might demand a finger puppet show. These, I realized, were not the strangers my mother had warned me about.
I asked a flight attendant to recommend a hotel for the night, and he consulted the rest of the Tokyo-based crew. Several minutes later, he found me in the darkened cabin and handed me a piece of paper with suggestions, including “Asakusa.”
“This is my neighborhood,” he said, introducing himself as Yori. “And this,” he pointed at a different word, “is a hostel popular with backpackers.” I hadn’t even arrived in Tokyo and I had already learned two important lessons. First, it’s not that scary to ask people for help. Second, I should dress better.
One hypothesis for why we love guidebooks so much is that relying on experts alleviates our fear of the unknown and makes us feel more in control. It’s an approach that makes total sense, except for one thing: It’s an ineffective way to plan a fun trip.
The problem with guidebooks has to do with what psychologists call affective forecasting—our ability to predict our emotional (that is, “affective”) reaction to a future event. It’s a skill at which we’re not particularly good. We overestimate how much a positive event will improve our lives; we underestimate our ability to bounce back from hardship. And when it comes to travel, we’re likely to be remarkably bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy the very experiences we’ve so carefully planned.
Instead of basing our decisions on our own analysis, we should just ask other people whether they had a good time. There’s ample research to back this up, but I still fall into the large camp of people who find it hard to believe that strangers could be better than a guidebook at predicting what I’ll like.
So I was surprised when I emerged from the train station at Asakusa. The northeast Tokyo neighborhood would never have jumped out at me on a map, but it was perfect. Instead of the high-rises and endless brand-name stores that characterize downtown, Asakusa was filled with charismatic pedestrian streets lined with small shops and restaurants, and was home to the Sensō-ji temple, the oldest in Tokyo. After dropping my bags at the hostel—which was clean, if basic—I asked for a restaurant recommendation in English from a young mother on the street and ended up in a small restaurant that specialized in tempura. Soon I was digging into the waitress’s favorite dish: a bowl of fried shrimp on top of rice. It wasn’t the best tempura I’d ever had, but I didn’t care. Alone in a strange city on my first night in town, I felt inspired by my experiences thus far—and excited about what might happen next.
Before collapsing in the hostel, I asked a woman who had helped me find a towel what I should do if I woke up early, a likely scenario, since 2:00 A.M. in Tokyo was 9:00 A.M. the day before on America’s West Coast. She suggested the Tsukiji Market. This wasn’t particularly creative—Tsukiji is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city, as well known as the Empire State Building or Times Square. But at 4:00 in the morning, what else was I going to do?
When I awoke at 3:30, sans alarm clock, I was tempted to stay in bed on principle—but I fought the urge and headed into the dark. The streets were deserted, the subway uncharacteristically empty, and I was surprised when I walked out of the station into a stream of people sweeping me toward the cavernous market.
Tsukiji operated at the speed of a stock exchange. Motorized carts barreled down its wet streets in unpredictable directions, forklifts hoisted pallets of sea creatures onto trucks, and no matter where I stood, I was in someone’s way. Worried about meeting my doom under a box of soft-shelled crabs, I stuck close to a row of parked trucks and soon entered the main area of the market. Rows of stalls displayed Styrofoam containers of fresh seafood—eels, mackerel, tightly coiled tentacles of octopus—each booth presided over by vendors wearing overcoats to keep out the cold.
The sun had barely begun to rise, but at the back of the market, the daily fish auction was already under way. Dozens of enormous frozen tuna lay on the ground in a large warehouse, each with a round steak cut from its tail and attached to its body by a piece of colored plastic rope. Buyers in black galoshes moved methodically from tuna to tuna, jabbing the exposed flesh of the tail with hook-tipped wooden sticks to determine the fattiness of the meat. As I watched, a man climbed atop a small box and began frantically ringing a small bell. Then, in a torrent of Japanese and hand signals, he auctioned off the fish. Despite the other tourists packed around me, I felt exhilarated, as if I’d stumbled onto something secret.
I should pause here to explain my method of communication. Figuring that most people’s English would be as nonexistent as my Japanese, I’d had a fluent friend translate an introduction and several key questions, which I’d printed out on oversize cards and now carried in my bag. If I wanted to ask people their favorite dish or sight to see, I would show them the card, have them write down the answer, and have someone else tell me what it said. (It was an excellent system overall, but beware Google Translate. Based on its software, my introductory card read: “Put fear! My name is Kasharin Price.… We are forced to travel to ask your opinion of the residents there, since the threshold and what to look funny or what should I do.”)
Other than seeking variety, I had no criteria for the people I approached—the first person who made eye contact with me usually got a card. Such was the case with a woman selling greens in a produce market next to Tsukiji. One smile tossed my way, and I thrust a question into her hands. It read, “What is your favorite restaurant?” so I tried to explain, via hand gestures, that what I actually meant was “I am hungry for breakfast but already had a large bowl of shrimp tempura for dinner, so could you recommend something a little lighter?” She shook her head shyly and handed it back.
A few days later, a stranger recommended a restaurant called AMOR. When I arrived I sat at the bar, which was decorated with a model train set left over from the previous owner. With one station in Asakusa and the other in a German Alpine village, the train was an odd addition to a French-Spanish restaurant in Tokyo. But the food lived up to the boundary-bending vibe: I tucked into a multicourse meal that included everything from smoked salmon crepes to sea urchin consommé. The chef and his wife hung out behind the bar as I ate, telling me their life stories. We traded e-mail addresses, and I encouraged them to contact me if they ever came to America. “Je suis très content—I am very happy,” the chef said at the end of the evening. So was I.
I continued to drift into experiences that I never would have had without strangers’ help. I met a former Seiko board member who was celebrating his seventy-sixth birthday with his wife at a sushi restaurant called Tuna People. The man, who spoke perfect English, gave me careful directions to a temple in his neighborhood north of Tokyo where monks put on a theatrical fire ritual called a goma ceremony several times a day. That night I asked the head sushi chef for his favorite dish, and after giving me both an unsolicited recommendation for an art museum and a plate of julienned raw squid, he presented me with a row of nigiri topped with uncooked mollusks. Following the suggestion of a young television host I met on the street, I sought out a public bath, and spent a morning soaking in a pool of steaming hot water backed by a mosaic of a blond mermaid. I asked an artsy-looking woman with highlighted hair and a fake leopard collar for her favorite lunch place and ended up in a Hawaiian-themed burger restaurant where the staff greeted me with “Aloha.”
I never knew what might happen next. I went to the Electric Power Historical Museum, experimented with something called an aroma computer, visited a climbing gym, tried on a trendy wig, took photos of myself in a subterranean photo-booth arcade, and rode a subway train at rush hour (yes, that was actually a suggestion). I approached men, women, old people, young people, visitors from Taiwan and Australia, toy-store employees, Starbucks baristas, art students, bank tellers, and a young woman dressed as a bunny rabbit. And after each encounter I tried to do everything people told me to do.
If you’d talked to me before the trip, I’d have predicted that my experiment would be stressful. And indeed, if it had lasted longer, my excitement might well have turned to anxiety and annoyance. But instead, forbidding myself to plan for the future allowed me to be more grounded in the present; I felt a level of calm I rarely do in my normal life, where I’m supported not by strangers but by a loving network of family and friends. Why was this—and how could I bring the feeling home?
My last night in Tokyo fell on a Friday. I spent it in an area called the Golden Gai, a dense grid of alleys lined with tiny watering holes. The bar I entered had six seats and no standing room, and was presided over by a couple who led double lives as professional voice-over actors for cartoon characters. I chatted with the bartender as her husband sat silently in the corner eating rice crackers.
“What did you do today?” she asked in hesitant English. I’d told her about my project as the bar’s other customers—three men in messy business suits—passed around my cards. When I announced that I’d visited a sento—a public bath—she laughed and interrupted me with a flood of Japanese that included two English words: “doctor fish.”
It was as if I were listening to A.M. sports radio—I could tell she was speaking my language, but had no idea what she was saying.
“You know,” she said, seeing my look of confusion. “Doctor fish.” She made a nibbling motion with her fingers to demonstrate. “Eating your feet?”
Eventually, I figured out what she was talking about: a beauty treatment in which you stick your feet into a tank of water and let a special breed of fish nibble off your dead skin. It got its start as a treatment for psoriasis but now, apparently, was attracting a trendier clientele.
This was not what I’d anticipated doing on my last night in Tokyo. Karaoke, maybe. Feet-munching fish, not so much. But what the hell—I’d come this far on other people’s suggestions. Why stop now? I had only one question: how to find a school of fish on call at 9:00 on a Friday night.
But that’s the thing—once you realize you can ask people for help, it doesn’t take long to find it. The owner gave the name of the spa to one of the businessmen, who made a call and found out the fish were not only on duty until 3:00 in the morning but were about a block from the bar. Excited, the owner led me around the corner and dropped me off in front of a glass window, through which I could see a tank full of fish nibbling on someone’s exposed toes.
I bought my ticket, rinsed my feet in the locker room, and plunked them into the tank. Then began the most ticklish ten minutes of my life as fish swam beneath and between my toes, quivering as they flicked their tiny mouths against my skin.
I doubt many philosophical treatises have been written in the company of doctor fish, but as a Japanese couple joined me in the tank and we giggled at one another (like love, tickling needs no translation), I had a thought. Learning to trust life is like learning to swim. First you flail, convinced you’re going to drown. Then you notice that if you calm down, it’s possible to tread water. And once you let go and just relax, you realize that the water was ready to support you all along.