TOKYO — After a week here, I still haven't mastered Japanese.
I'm prone to say hello when I mean thank you, or vice versa, and I seldom know what I am ordering at restaurants, so the chicken might actually be eel. But regardless of what I'm attempting to communicate, the Japanese people bow graciously, which is probably a way of hiding their laughter.
In case you're wondering, I'm here at the request of the Japanese distributor of the movie "The Soloist," and to meet with the publishers of a certain book by the same name. I'm not going to say much more about that, given the flap over the Sunday movie promotion in The Times that drew some complaints from readers and colleagues.
For the record, I wish it had looked a little less like a news section, and would have said so if I'd seen it before publication. On the other hand, ad revenue pays for the journalism we do, and I thought the section was a fair summary of how the filmmakers got to know my friend Mr. Nathaniel Anthony Ayers and were inspired by him, as I have been.
In Japan, reporters were more interested in learning about Mr. Ayers and how I got to know him than they were about the film and its stars. The representatives of a Tokyo mental health agency told me they hope the book and movie will help them de-stigmatize mental illness.
Let me move on, though, to some thoughts on the city of Tokyo and what Los Angeles can learn from it. I'm no expert on Tokyo, this being my first visit to the city. And Tokyo is no Shangri-la, nor is Japanese society perfect. But I like a lot of what I'm seeing, and in no particular order, here are a few thoughts:
This is the cleanest city I've ever visited, and residents seem to take great pride in that. One day my wife and I saw a uniformed man on his knees, scraping a tiny wad of gunk off the pavement, and we saw no graffiti anywhere. In Los Angeles, why do we think it's OK to foul our own nest?
From my hotel window, I watched the comings and goings of trains day and night on a seven-track railway. Then there's the extensive and efficient subway system, which of course makes L.A.'s look like it was designed for a city the size of Bakersfield. As for auto traffic, it can be miserable, but commuters have alternatives. And I didn't see a single Hummer, the car of choice for Jaime de la Vega, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's deputy mayor of transportation. I'm willing to take up a collection and have both of them sent to Tokyo to take notes.
