Far too much has already been said about whether one moment or another actually constitutes the start of a new millennium. I will add no more other than to say that any event about which no-one is quite sure when it occurs cannot be much of an event at all. Anyway, by popular decree, it seems tonight, 31 December, 1999, is the night.

I decided some time ago to be at Meiji-jingu as the New Year begins. I’ve grown tired of the sameness of this so-called event in Sydney and, put off by the more than usual degree of hype this year, wanted to be somewhere completely different.

For most of New Year’s Eve however, I have no plans. I start the day by going for a short walk to Sengaku-ji shrine. All the graves are smoking with incense and a constant stream of families are arriving on foot, by bicycle, and in chauffeur-driven cars to pay their respects and pray for a good year ahead. A sense of silent purpose hangs in the air along with the smoke. A few cans of water have been placed against the wall in case the fire gets out of control.

Inside the shrine museum the relics of the forty-seven ronin are blackened with age, but still inspire a certain awe. I imagine the ronin must have been a fearsome nocturnal apparition in their winged helmets and suits of armour.

Instead of going back to the hotel I continue to walk through the streets. They are all quiet. The sky is overcast. The day has a subdued and paradoxical ‘day after’ feel to it. I wander for miles through the Tokyo suburbs, past graveyards, apartment buildings, clothing boutiques, roadside shrines, all seemingly marking time just like me. Hours later I find Shibuya. There are now three giant outdoor screens here, and today one of them is showing scenes of… Shibuya. It even shows pictures of itself, but the temptation to incur infinite recursion is resisted. A camera crew, whose fellows must haunt this area on a full-time posting, is interviewing a pair of ko-gyaru. The cameraman is leaning left and right to ensure that necessary trendy cinema verite edginess. Photographers abound today. They appear at times to be taking pictures of each other, though this may be just an accidental side-effect of their local population density.

In contrast to the momentous nature of the day, nothing is out of the ordinary. Except, perhaps, things are quieter than normal. Many regular Shibuya shoppers will already be home with their parents in the provinces and prefectures, visiting their family shrines, or getting ready to do so. Heartful Town Shibuya is taking the new millennium rather coolly. A few illuminated hearts hang here and there, and perhaps there are a few extra lanterns hanging over the subway stairs.

It is four o’clock in the afternoon; eight hours to go. I watch the inactivity from upstairs in Starbucks Coffee, then drift up to Tokyu Hands to look around. I’m delighted to see a miniature alarm clock that fits inside the ear, a portable bidet unit, a small tripod that can add a self-timer function to disposable cameras. I eat a pizza and salad at Charleston & Co, killing time.

I have another coffee. The café staff slur their ‘thank you’s’ so they sound like agzaimashta. I realise I’ve run out of things to do, so I walk over to Meiji-jingu to see if anything is happening yet. At Yoyogi Stadium a huge crowd of teenage girls is gathering for a concert this evening. Many of them are wearing black and red vinyl, and a few are sporting explosive flaming red hairstyles, or wigs. I fail to find out why.

Three hours to go. Inside the shrine gardens there are hundreds of large lanterns where once there was a row of stalls displaying chrysanthemums. There is a giant screen and piped music. I don’t know why.

Hundreds of people is slowly walking towards the shrine, which is out of sight still, deeper in the park. There are parties of schoolgirls in uniform. Ko-gyaru scream at having to walk over the gently sloping bridges in their platform boots. I wonder how Louis Vuitton bags and Burberry scarves can retain any sort of cachet when every woman has them. Obviously the desire to possess them is not so that one appears exclusively rich, but to ensure that one does not appear exclusively poor. Squads of gloved police walk around with batons, loud hailers, and illuminated standards. A phalanx of scouts shuffles into position. Several people carry or wheel small Razor or Micro scooters, but I never see anyone riding one.

Inside the final courtyard I take my position off to the right, so I can watch the crowd as well as whatever is going to happen at the front. Already a few thousand people wait in the dark and cold. A dozen shrine attendants are wheeling around a giant taiko drum, as big as a truck, inside the building. The taiko is moved back and forth amid much gesticulation. It is so big it travels on its own cart. The drum skins must be about two metres across – I wonder what they were cut from, whales?

The piped music is so far away it cannot be heard here, so we all just stand and patiently wait in silence. There is no entertainment, nothing in fact, except a few police announcements. Now and again people throw coins forward. They sometimes fall inside the shrine enclosure, but more often flutter off course and hit someone standing closer to the front. No-one seems to mind. The police practice a manoeuvre, holding aloft banners illustrated with cartoon characters. The manoeuvre completed, they marshal themselves to one side, inside a square of yellow tape. I am tempted to go away and come back later, but the fear that I might miss something keeps me where I am. It is so cold that I stand as still as possible, so no freezing air can slip inside my clothes. The crowd continues to grow.

Two hours to go. Inside the shrine dozens of attendants dressed in white begin to assemble beside the drum. This is it, I think. But then the attendants all walk away again.

A tall Dutch couple arrive and push through the crowd to the front and centre. It doesn’t take long before an errant coin bounces off the Dutchman’s head. Ping! He turns around angrily and demands to know who threw it. Everyone looks back at him blankly. When it happens a second time the indignant couple move away, still apparently under the misapprehension that they have been victimised.

Thirty minutes to go, and something happens: VIP’s are shown to their places inside the shrine. It is now I notice that the steps and columns of the shrine are all encased in plastic, to protect them, presumably, from the coin storm. Cameramen scramble on the roof. One loses his footing and slides down the roof. He is just about to tip over the edge and fall to the ground when he manages to catch hold of a ladder. That rates as an incident that almost happened.

Mobile phones are consulted regularly. The earth resonates as ko-gyaru clump past in their heavy footwear. The time is getting close now.

One minute to go and a young group behind me start a count-down: roku-ju, go-ju kyu, go-ju hachi, go-ju shichi…

A few crackers are let off. I can hear singing. Now things are really starting to happen, I think. The count-down comes to its climax: san, ni, ichi! The crowd manages a big cheer, thousands of coins thrown from further back rain down on us, a fluttering silver snowstorm, and a priest thumps the taiko with a heavy stick, Boom.

At the same moment, after standing for three hours in the cold and dark, everyone at the front runs, literally runs, away! The millennial moment arrives and departs all in the same instant, and now, apparently, it is over and people are keen to go. At the moment I had expected things to begin, it turns out they had just finished. I am astonished, dumbfounded, in fact. I stand aside and watch as human waves surge forward, and coins fall in a tinkling deluge (I realise why the police are wearing plastic face-guards). People moving up from the back press on and disappear off to the side – in a great rip-tide of citizenry. The police channel the flow with hand-held barriers, and the priest keeps beating the drum, boom, boom, to an ever-increasing cadence. I’m eager for something else to happen, but the millennial event, such as it was, has already passed.

A familiar idea starts to form. Of course! I think. What more appropriate way to treat an arbitrary second in an arbitrary timeframe? The sheer uneventfulness of the moment has made it, paradoxically, quite an event, at least for me. Later, when friends and I discuss what we did on the millennial New Year’s Eve, my story is the strangest and most memorable. Everyone else just saw fireworks and tasted alcohol to a greater or lesser degree.

A moment realised is a moment already gone. Tonight, a nihilistic culmination of 1,000 years. At a deeper level the way it turns out also seems essentially Japanese. A long and uneventful preparation endured, a sense of moving closer to the heart of things and finally, at the threshold and the moment of realisation, the revelation that at the very core there is… nothing. Let’s all go home! It is like the central emptiness of Shinto shrines, particularly those at Ise and Atsuta which are supposed to house objects that no-one has ever seen, or the void at the heart of Zen, or the space between the rocks in Japanese gardens, or the absence of the first person in Japanese language and thinking. The more I think about it, the more perfect it seems.

I follow the crowd away from the shrine. Two girls rush up to me and shout ‘Hallo! Happy New Year!’ It seems so, now, because there is an orgy of consumption going on (I knew that Christmas abstemiousness couldn’t last). The path I follow is lined by stalls and it is here the hunger and cold that has been eating away at us is now banished by hot-dogs, roasted rice balls, hot cocoa and warm sake. People are also buying up great numbers of charms and fortunes from the shrine shops. Everything is being pursued with a vigour at odds with the inactivity of the last three hours. I join in and come away with a full belly and a ‘disease recovery’ charm. The charm is probably unnecessary, but we can never be too sure about these things.

I make it out of the park at about 1:30 am, and see the in-going crowd still slowly shuffling forward. Three million people will pass through here in the next three days.

I note that all the lights of the city are still shining, my phone still works, that the trains are running, that shops remain unlooted, and the sky is still in place. So what happened to the Y2K bug? It hit us and we didn’t even blink. Later in the day the newscasters tell us the big Y2K story is that suddenly…nothing happened. They could have been talking about my evening. Many people on television seem genuinely upset that we have been deprived of all the anticipated disaster stories. It’s so disappointing for the media and their advertisers.