essays | places
Japan
neat quirks
TOCHO, Tokyo / Japan · 2016 another sun clocking off
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Let me tell you a thing or two about Japan, because that’s all the things I know about it. I didn’t spend much time there, and all of it on Tokyo. So now I’m not sure whether it was the country’s heart I saw boiling in that capital cauldron, or its bum. Indeed, there were plenty of lives there, arts and architectures, pasts and futures, and all sorts of visual oxymorons. Here a polite wildness, there a cute craze, some business bros, some manga maids, temple truths and toilet tricks. A lot of cryptic culture that couldn’t be deciphered without a microscope. And I hadn’t brought one. I was only equipped for a glimpse, but what I saw I liked, and what I liked I will pick up again somewhen.
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a glimpse
lines WHO’S COUNTING | They say Tokyo’s Shibuya crossing is the world’s busiest; but really, who's counting?
passages BUSY DIZZY | If your office job isn’t for you, being busy might make you dizzy. Fingers stapled to the keyboard, you hastily type your lifetime away, 8hrs a day, while your anxiety metastasizes under the halogen glow. The next weekend ever too far, the next vacation farther yet, retirement but a remote dream of a dream of a different life. A mirage really, once you get there heaving all those years and having lost youth’s lightness along the way. No more backspace, no more escape. Tied up by inertia and plagued with angst, your cellmates in the cubical penitentiary are guilty of the same crime – high stakes trades: contentment for happiness, security for moments, office life for life. And so the self-inflicted sentence will be just that: office life for life. But there is always a way to break out if you risk what you have for who you are, and even this picture is trying to get out of its rectangle if you stare at it long enough.
passages PAPER THIN | The brain renders our reality rather square. Once the messy outside world is funneled through our perception, it is arranged neatly in boxes labeled sensemaking, order, and reason. Just how we like it: little. digestible. bits. of. predictability. beep. The chaos that lurks behind the reality we believe in is unsettling in its uncertainty, so to keep our calm, we keep our distance. But, every now and then our senses run into something the brain cannot wrap its mind around – inexplicable and inescapable glitches in our well organized and highly functional processors that defy our cognition and control with nothing but a cheap trick.
Tokyo was full of wormholes that flushed you into all sorts of little odd cosmoses.
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Tokyo / Japan · 2016 playing the horses at 10am
Busy, yet quiet; neat, yet quirky.
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Tokyo / Japan · 2016 neon night
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places / stories
Tokyo / Lingering Alone
the difference between seeing a place and being in a place
