Tokyo
<Cripes, what an old post – forgotten in the Drafts folder! going to push this out largely unfinished, time to move on to new things, new continents!>
It’s not all that often that a highly anticipated destination exceeds your expectations, then desentizes you to the point where you forget just how extreme and unique an experience you’re having. Granted, it’s been a while since I was home, so customary reference points are now just loose & shifting anchors; novelty and oddity are becoming the norm on this trip (thankfully!). What’s more, passing through Beijing and Shanghai immediately beforehand may have somewhat softened the full-on experience of urban, cutting-edge Asia.
Rather than go into detail, here are some vague observations:
- Seeing a suited businessman reading a violent / saccharine-cute / pornographic comic on the metro is much more likely than seeing him unfurl a Financial Times, Economist or local equivalent
- Fashion is all-important; but from all reports, Japanese society is remarkably cliquey, at all ages. Couples rarely form outside the confines of your social circle or without an introduction from someone in it. Fashion, I guess, isn’t used to attract partners in clubs or around town, but rather for self-expression or for cementing or improving one’s identity and standing in a clique. Or it might simply be a concession to what must be astoundingly heavy social pressures, in a society that from a very young age sees naval uniforms donned by schoolboys and incredibly short skirts struggling to leave schoolgirls with any pudeur [or protection from the many lewd gazes that about on Tokyo's admirably efficient public transport system!]
- Advertising is everywhere. I imagine individual adverts must have very low impact – to the tourist they’re baffling and blinding, but the locals must surely already be banner-blind, as insanity must be the logical conclusion of the endless attention demands of Tokyo oh-so-very needy flat surfaces
- Tokyo is a vertical town. Its “malls” line roads in two dimensions (along and up) in stark contrast to the more Western approach of 3D (along, in deep, and maybe up) retail and entertainment. As bar crawling tourists we really struggled to find watering holes – it’s frankly just odd and awkward to walk down a street with the bars as much as seven floors above your head, and the crawl becomes a search for drunken revellers streaming out of the ground floor elevator followed by a quick guess as to what floor they’ve come from. The rise is of course made in the optimism that the revellers have not just left because of last orders…
Verticality is just one example of why Tokyo seems to me to be a hard town to settle down in. Without a strong pre-existing network of comperes and insiders who already know which floor of which street to head to, browsing your way to a healthy social (and possibly professional) life really isn’t an option in Tokyo. The temp, the visitor – the unchaperoned newbie – is relegated to a purely passive role, that of observer. Good thing, then, that Tokyo offers so much to the eye <
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