Tamachi Revisited

 

Last Friday night I enjoyed an enormously fun evening in the company of a half dozen old friends, former colleagues from my early days in NEC. The reunion was held at an Italian restaurant in Tamachi, a nostalgic area since we all worked there at the time. That was the era just before and during the Japanese Bubble, when I was in my 30s and they were in their 20s, except for our very well-liked and respected department manager, who is some years older than I am.

We traded recollections about many of those long-ago shared adventures, including near-nightly partying, the whole crew helping me to move to a new apartment, trips to ski and to climb Mt. Fuji, and all sorts of antics that we got into, some wiser than others, all fun.

After the party—great food and an extraordinarily attentive server who kept our glasses full whether with high-end draft beer or well-selected wines—most of us moved up to a bar in the same building, where we had a nijikai (afterparty) just like old times, or nearly so…we may have slowed down just a little in the intervening decades.

It was great fun, thrilling to interact in person with old friends with whom I’ve only kept contact by SNS  and nengajo New Year cards, and an interesting if somewhat bittersweet experience to carouse in the Tamachi/Shibaura area, where I worked for three decades.

Much had changed, of course. The Morinaga Building, which once housed both the Morinaga and the NEC HQs (and my office until later moves to Shiba 4-chome and Shibaura), is now a massive construction site. The hotel just around the corner from the party venue, where I spent the night to avoid last-train worries, used to be an office building where I did some part-time tutoring of a company president. That was around 2018, before he had to move his company elsewhere in Shibaura; I worked at the new site one early morning per week until I was hospitalized in 2019, the last time I had visited the Tamachi area.

Places change with time, as do we all, but I was very happy to confirm that my old friends have changed not at all in any of the really important ways.