Tokyo Dissonance
One of the questions I’ve been carrying around for the last year is, “why cities?”
A year ago we spent two months in Australia and New Zealand, the combined population of which equal the metro population total of the world’s largest metropolitan area: Tokyo. How is that? Why Tokyo? And how does it exist alongside other megacities? Of course Crash Course has a video on that.
City life is part of our everyday reality living in Peru, but Asia takes it to a new level. My time in Japan, Thailand, and Cambodia was marked with the presence of people everywhere. So many humans. But Tokyo in particular captured my imagination—because there are so many people, more than the entire population of Peru but in one city, and yet, there was no traffic and no trash.
Craig Mod recently wrote about the phenomenon of garbage in Japan and, hilariously, US Americans’ desperate need of immediate access to trash cans.
A funny thing happens when a Snickers bar goes from whole to eaten — the wrapper transmogrifies from useful to toxic. Suddenly, this thing that was keeping germs and dirt off your chocolate sugar log is now “useless” and with this comes the heaviest burden a modern person unencumbered by genocide or famine can hold: garbage responsibility.
In Tokyo, we made our way to Shibuya, participated in the famous crossing, and took a time-lapse of the crossing from above. But even so, something didn’t sit right with me. This piece of our itinerary didn’t fit with the rest. It’s not Tokyo, really.
Craig Mod, forever walking outside and between Japanese cities, said this after a recent walk through Shibuya:
Because what Tokyo actually is — what Tokyo is in its truest, most distilled essence — is silence. Tokyo is silent back lanes and dark winding alleys. Tokyo is low-rise homes and affordable housing that stretches from the soundless, wide rivers abutting Chiba to the quiet mountains of Yamanashi, becoming farmland much more quickly than you’d imagine. Tokyo is a vibrant shotengai sans mania, filled with local shops owned by multi-generational families — lit by warm bare bulbs at night — who know the faces of all their customers, just outside a station ten minutes west of Shibuya. Tokyo is Gakugei Daigaku and Koenji where community and subculture thrives. Tokyo is walking Aoyama Cemetery in total silence, just down the road from just whatever it might be that Center Gai represents. Tokyo is sento culture, where folks commune in hushed nakedness. Tokyo is vibrant central neighborhoods like Kagurazaka that mix the old and the new powerfully, that have fascinating histories, beautiful topographies, secrets and architectural delights and a feeling of true life being lived. And a very, very tiny part of central Tokyo is now, I guess: The Circus.
If you are not already reading Craig Mod’s work, and are interested in Japan or travel or just want an incredible perspective on what it means to be human together, what are you waiting for?