Essay : Living with danger - Lessons from the Streets of London in 1980's

There was a deafening bang, followed by a deep, rumbling tremor that shook the ground beneath me.

 

The elderly pedestrians all dropped to the pavement in unison, as if rehearsed.

 

Across the street, an old man lay flat on his stomach, waving urgently in my direction. “Down!” he bellowed.

 

Instinct took over. I flung myself onto the pavement without a second thought.

 

Moments later, the wail of sirens filled the air—fire engines, ambulances, police cars, all racing past in a blur of flashing lights.

 

And then, just as swiftly as they had dived for cover, the prone figures around me picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and strode away as though nothing had happened.

 

I had arrived in Britain in the 1980's at the age of fourteen, dragged along by my parents on account of my father’s job. I hadn’t wanted to come. Life had been perfectly fine back home, thank you very much. Germany was still split into East and West, Margaret Thatcher was running the show, and Gorbachev was making headlines. My days were filled with school, friends, and whatever was trending in Japan at the time.

 

But my parents—having devoured one too many essays by a fashionable writer of the era called Yoko Kirishima —had latched onto the rather optimistic belief that “a child will pick up a foreign language in less than a year, given total immersion.” And so, despite our protests, my sibling and I—one in secondary school, the other still in middle school—were hauled off on this grand overseas adventure, English skills or not.

 

The country we landed in was in the throes of IRA terrorism. Border disputes, religious tensions—bombings and attacks were part of the daily rhythm of life in the capital.

 

None of this had been in the brochure, of course. No one had thought to mention it to us before we arrived. We were simply told to “take responsibility for our own safety” and left to work it out from there.

 

My parents, unable to speak the local language, had no choice but to send me off to the city’s international school, where they assumed I would somehow make sense of things.

 

Slowly, painfully, I did. I learned to decipher the words swirling around me, to understand the cadence of this foreign tongue.

 

And that was when I realised something.

 

A great many of those words were being hurled at us, not in welcome, but in hostility.

 

There was a time when the word "Oriental" was tossed around with casual indifference, long before it was deemed outdated and offensive. Back then, people like us—few in number—were always aware of a certain undercurrent of prejudice.

 

Of course, discrimination against foreigners isn’t unique to any one country. Japan has its own share of it, just as every nation does. The moment you step outside your homeland, you quickly realise that being treated as an outsider is simply part of the package. Whether you let it weigh you down or brush it off as an inevitable reality depends, perhaps, on the strength of your own resolve.

 

Still, there was no getting used to the sting of it—hearing strangers hurling slurs at my family, assuming we wouldn’t understand. The more fluent I became, the less I wished I could understand at all. Ignorance had been bliss, and in those early days, before I could fully grasp the language, life had felt a great deal easier.

 

The harshest words often came from the younger crowd. But there were others, too—people who saw my presence not as an intrusion, but as an opportunity.

 

"If you’re going to live here and grow up here," they would say, "then you ought to know how things work."

 

And so, these kind souls—mostly elderly in the Easte End of London, with time-worn faces and a patience forged through years of hardship—took it upon themselves to teach me. They guided me through the intricacies of life in this city: the manners expected of its people, the history embedded in its streets, the nuances of its language, the peculiarities of its customs.

 

One of the more memorable lessons they passed down was what to do in the event of a bomb attack.

 

The first rule: drop to the ground. Debris from an explosion could come hurtling through the air, and sometimes, so could the bomb itself. Standing upright in such moments was a sure way to get yourself killed.

 

Stay low. Protect yourself. And once the sirens start wailing, once the police and ambulances rush in and you can be certain the immediate danger has passed—get out, quickly. Because if one bomb has gone off, there’s always the chance of another.

 

At some point, I asked an old woman why the people here seemed to know these survival tactics so well. "Is it because of all the terrorist attacks in the city?" I wondered aloud.

 

She shook her head. "No, love," she said, with the weary certainty of someone who had seen too much. "It’s because of the war."

 

During the Second World War, she explained, this city had been a target. She and the other elders had been just teenagers when the bombs fell. Evacuation hadn’t come quickly enough for many of them, and by the time they were sent off to the countryside, they had already witnessed their home reduced to rubble.

 

It was, in their eyes, nothing new. Just another chapter in a long history of falling bombs and picking up the pieces.

 

Living in the countryside, far from home and family, had been difficult, they told me. They were only children at the time, but their words echoed the sentiments I had heard from my own uncles over the years.

 

In both Japan and this country, the Second World War had left deep scars on those who had been children when it unfolded.

 

"If you're going to live here," one elderly woman told me, her voice steady with the weight of experience, "you need to understand that this is a city under siege. A city of bombs and barricades. This war—it’s been going on for hundreds of years. It won’t end overnight. You have to stay alert, always. Watch your back and protect yourself."

 

It felt, in a way, like a test. A quiet, unspoken challenge from those who had spent their lives in this place. Could I survive here, an outsider in a city where people like me were few and far between? Could I endure its hardships?

 

At the time, bombings were a grim and regular occurrence. The newspapers covered them, the evening news reported them, but the people of the city took it all in their stride. "This is just how it is," they would say, with the weary acceptance of those who had never known anything different.

 

Years later, life led me to encounters with people from the other side of the conflict. I learned about the tangled history of religious wars, about centuries of grievances too complex to be neatly unravelled.

 

But I never returned to the country where I had spent those formative years.

 

Time moved on. The EU was formed, and with it came freedom of movement. The bombings in that city finally came to an end.

 

And yet, in a twist of history, Britain later turned its back on nearly five decades of EU membership, choosing instead to steer its own course once more.

 

Now, that same old border—once the flashpoint of so much strife—is growing uneasy again. The old tensions, long buried but never truly gone, are stirring.

 

No one knows if dialogue alone will be enough to settle the matter. From the other side of the world, all I can do is hope that the city I once knew does not slip back into the shadows of its past.