School portraits / One lease, one bus stop, the first month of a Tokyo August
The Lease Before the Bus Map
An American family who signed a Tokyo lease for a bakery, and only then opened the school’s bus map.
Ross Calloway signed a two-year lease on an apartment in Nakameguro because of a bakery, and only afterwards did his wife Megan open the bus map for The American School in Japan. Their daughter Harper, six, had a place in Grade 1 at the Chofu campus, out in western Tokyo, and the school is clear that its buses serve specified routes and that it does not promise one to every address. Megan had read that sentence twice before the move. Ross had read the bakery’s reviews.
The school’s advice is to confirm the stop, the pickup time and the journey length before signing a lease, which was now an interesting historical document. Megan traced the routes with her finger. Ross stood behind her saying, “There, that one,” about lines that were, on closer inspection, a river, a railway and the edge of the paper. Harper, who had been told that in Japan she would go to school on a bus, asked which colour hers was. “We’re finding out,” said Megan, in the voice of a woman finding out.
Ross emailed the school, the way one does when hoping a map is wrong. The reply was prompt and kind and confirmed the map. He then did what Megan described as the five stages of Tokyo housing: denial (“we’ll drive”), anger (at the bakery), bargaining (with the landlord, who was charming and immovable), despair (on the floor of the half-unpacked apartment) and, finally, a property app. Harper, meanwhile, had made friends with the bakery’s cat and was not planning to leave.
The second apartment was smaller, further from any bread worth mentioning, and eight minutes’ walk from a stop on a Chofu route with a pickup time that Megan wrote on the fridge in red. 6.52. She wrote it large, because Ross had looked at it and said, “a.m.?”, and she wanted there to be no further discussion. The landlord released them from the first lease for a sum Ross referred to thereafter as “the croissant tax”, and the bakery’s cat was not consulted.
On the first morning the whole family stood at the stop at 6.40 in a grey August dawn, Harper in a backpack the size of a Grade 1 child, Ross holding a coffee he had made at home with an expression of loss. The bus came at 6.52. Harper got on without looking back, which the parenting books call healthy and parents call something else, and Megan and Ross walked home to an apartment that was, for the first time in a month, exactly where it needed to be.
Harper now wakes them. She has a clock, and the clock says 6.15, and she stands in the doorway fully dressed, backpack on, saying, “It doesn’t wait,” which is the single most accurate thing anyone in the Calloway household has said about Tokyo. Ross has found a bakery in the new neighbourhood. It is not as good. He goes anyway, at 7.05, after the bus, every morning, like a man visiting a grave.