Near Failures #8

I was at the end of my tether that night in Tokyo; I certainly wasn’t looking for photographs. I’d run out of money in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and after hours of searching, I couldn’t find any ATMs that would accept my cards. I was hungry, cold, wet, tired, and unable to continue paying for my tiny hotel room in Ueno if I couldn’t find some cash.

It was February of 2008, in the middle of one of the most memorable vacations I’d had to date. I’d just wrapped shooting on a feature film I was working on and working on the editing, and I’d only recently started to be able to take such personal trips abroad, alone, luxuriating in not having any kind of itinerary or objective other than just pure wandering, which to me is a state of contemplative bliss.

Tokyo was eminently suitable for this, everything well-planned and conveniently laid out, meals and train tickets available through pleasant, simple interfaces, and all the space one could want to just be alone with one’s thoughts with a bustling city to explore, just unfamiliar enough to be interesting without inducing too much stress.

Significantly, social media wasn’t the endorphin-squeezing juggernaut that it is today; this was also back when there weren’t so many tourists that you could walk for blocks without seeing a single local person. I’d packed simply, just clothes, an old Thinkpad laptop from back when they were made by IBM, and my first DSLR, a Canon 20D with a 10-22mm wide-angle lens to capture the crowded alleys and lanes of the Japanese capital. At f3.5, it wasn’t the brightest lens, so I often resorted to lower shutter speeds, lending a surreal feel to many of my nights shots.

All of this might have been why my diminishing finances failed to arouse my attention until I literally ran out of cash to eat dinner. Tokyo was not cheap in those days, and the February weather wasn’t making things any easier, the mixture of sleet and snow constantly seeking points of entry into my jacket as I went from bank to bank to bank, only to find my Taiwanese cards rejected at one after another. If I couldn’t find any cash I’d be out on the street, as I was paying for my room each day with tickets from a vending machine in the lobby.

Taking refuge in a 7-Eleven, I spied a small cash-dispensing machine. No way this works, I thought. Even if I try, it will probably just eat my card. But I had no other choice. I gingerly inserted my card into the machine, wincing as I did so.

To my surprise, it worked. Where every single international banking branch had failed, the humble convenience store prevailed. I was fluid again; all was well.

I walked back out onto the street to find that it was snowing again, but now the lights of the city glowed with an immediate vibrancy, the bright colors of the signs and traffic lights glimmering through the thick flakes, bouncing off the wet streets as a man rushed across the street in front of me. I took a shot.