I (Heart) Tokyo
Jan. 20th, 2006 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusTokyo is the world's largest city and most expensive city, thronging with the world's longest-living people. You can say that without leaving the realm of objectivity. But to say that it's far and away the world's best and most glorious city, over 200% more attractive than the next most glorious metropolis, New York, its women implausibly beautiful and deliriously sexy, its daily experience (even in the depths of winter) one of "irrational exuberance"... well, that's subjective, isn't it? But it's how I feel when I'm here.
Tokyo lives just slightly faster than the speed of my brain, eats food just slightly more delicious than anything I've ever tasted, and is always just a bit cooler, more knowledgeable and more refined in its tastes than I am. It's like a big brother I admire, a mentor, a guide to life. The last three days, brief but sweet, have reminded me how much I love this city, and how much I want to live here again some day. My friends here, gaijin and Japanese, all seem to have quicksilver minds; conversation flicks and jumps from topic to topic with an incredible liveliness. The city fills me with energy, sexual and intellectual.
Yesterday began with lunch at one of my favourite Tokyo spots (but there are hundreds of contenders), a cafe called Floor in Kitchijioji. I was terrified that Floor might have gone the way of so many of my favourite Tokyo places, and fallen under the developers' wrecking ball. But no, it's still there, perched atop a shabby, ugly building squeezed up against the tracks of the Keio Line. There on the top floor is a sort of charmed world.
Started by the people who founded Idee in Aoyama, Floor is a collection of worn, disparate elements held together by faultless taste. There's a matching mismatch of designer chairs. Lunch (fish, rice, soup) comes in beautiful big worn and cracked bowls, also mismatched, and the chai has big irregular flat rocks of ice in it. The Keio Line trains chug towards Shimokitazawa in their pink livery, filled with chattering schoolgirls. Sunshine floods in through the windows, and you flip through stacks of old copies of Relax, Casa Brutus, Ryuko Tsushin and Studio Voice while well-chosen music plays. You buy a Marimekko hat in the store downstairs, then check out a tiny record store selling old Famicom cartridges... And all seems right with the world.
The afternoon is spent in another, very different, but equally great, cafe, Masako Cafe in Shimokita. This is a windowless jazz den with hipster jazz playing non-stop, beaded curtains, and manga-crammed shelves. The waitress tells us that this place too won't be threatened by the development plans for Shimokita's north side. Good news!
The day ends at Office, Gaienmae, where I do an interview with Martin Webb of the Japan Times, and say an almost tearful farewell to my friends -- Florian, David and Shizu, Alastair, Alex Rich, Misa-Chan, Satoshi, Marxy (pictured)... and Tokyo itself, incarnated temporarily in the flow of head and tail lights on the Aoyama Dori below, with Hikaru Utada and other beauties gazing down benignly from the billboards above.
Tokyo lives just slightly faster than the speed of my brain, eats food just slightly more delicious than anything I've ever tasted, and is always just a bit cooler, more knowledgeable and more refined in its tastes than I am. It's like a big brother I admire, a mentor, a guide to life. The last three days, brief but sweet, have reminded me how much I love this city, and how much I want to live here again some day. My friends here, gaijin and Japanese, all seem to have quicksilver minds; conversation flicks and jumps from topic to topic with an incredible liveliness. The city fills me with energy, sexual and intellectual.
Yesterday began with lunch at one of my favourite Tokyo spots (but there are hundreds of contenders), a cafe called Floor in Kitchijioji. I was terrified that Floor might have gone the way of so many of my favourite Tokyo places, and fallen under the developers' wrecking ball. But no, it's still there, perched atop a shabby, ugly building squeezed up against the tracks of the Keio Line. There on the top floor is a sort of charmed world.
Started by the people who founded Idee in Aoyama, Floor is a collection of worn, disparate elements held together by faultless taste. There's a matching mismatch of designer chairs. Lunch (fish, rice, soup) comes in beautiful big worn and cracked bowls, also mismatched, and the chai has big irregular flat rocks of ice in it. The Keio Line trains chug towards Shimokitazawa in their pink livery, filled with chattering schoolgirls. Sunshine floods in through the windows, and you flip through stacks of old copies of Relax, Casa Brutus, Ryuko Tsushin and Studio Voice while well-chosen music plays. You buy a Marimekko hat in the store downstairs, then check out a tiny record store selling old Famicom cartridges... And all seems right with the world.
The afternoon is spent in another, very different, but equally great, cafe, Masako Cafe in Shimokita. This is a windowless jazz den with hipster jazz playing non-stop, beaded curtains, and manga-crammed shelves. The waitress tells us that this place too won't be threatened by the development plans for Shimokita's north side. Good news!
The day ends at Office, Gaienmae, where I do an interview with Martin Webb of the Japan Times, and say an almost tearful farewell to my friends -- Florian, David and Shizu, Alastair, Alex Rich, Misa-Chan, Satoshi, Marxy (pictured)... and Tokyo itself, incarnated temporarily in the flow of head and tail lights on the Aoyama Dori below, with Hikaru Utada and other beauties gazing down benignly from the billboards above.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 04:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 08:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-21 07:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-21 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 05:12 am (UTC)when to new york, do you travel?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 05:20 am (UTC)and you know "irrational exuberance" is kind of code for a tenuous situation bound to collapse dramatically, right? I like to think that Tokyo's exuberance is well founded, and (at least semi-)permanent.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 08:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 08:22 pm (UTC)Summit
Date: 2006-01-21 04:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 10:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-21 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-21 01:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:39 am (UTC)just so you know, the final editing of syllabus of errors is almost done. i just need some time to take some distance with it, then i'll send you a file.
dewa dewa
olivier
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:48 pm (UTC)Is this term of conscious "Greenspan-ese" (http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5381959) nature or borrowing?
That place looks sweet (Floor) I am diggin that yellowish chair but especially like the wall-hanging of the bunny on cloth.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 03:28 pm (UTC)Off topic (on differences)
Date: 2006-01-20 04:52 pm (UTC)Just to keep you (and your comment readers) updated on the cultural differences in perception. I cut and paste from todays Science (Highlights in the literature section):
There is ample evidence that people in different cultures can exhibit dissimilar ways of thinking. For instance, Asians pay more attention to context and to the relationships between focal (foreground) objects and background in their descriptions of visual scenes, whereas Americans mention the focal items with greater frequency. Why this occurs is unclear, as is the cognitive source of the differences in behavior.
Miyamoto et al. present a set of studies that begin to identify the underlying processes and how the physical environment may serve to reinforce cultural distinctions. They presented Japanese and American study participants with photographs taken of hotels, schools, and post offices located in large, medium, and small cities in Japan and the United States. People of both nationalities rated the scenes of Japan as being more complicated (more objects, more chaotic, more obscured parts); although the U.S. scenes increased in complexity with city size, the Japanese scenes did not and were all more complex than those from the large U.S. city (New York). A similar ranking was obtained by analyzing the photos with the NIH Image program. In order to assess the influence of complexity on behavior, both nationalities were tested for their ability to detect changes in focal objects and background information in neutral vignettes after having been primed with the photos of Japan or the United States. Having first viewed a more complex scene improved the abilities of both the American and Japanese participants in reporting contextual, as opposed to focal, changes. -- GJC
Psychol. Sci. 17, 113 (2006).
So there is hope for all you americans out there. Japanize your brains!
/bug
Re: Off topic (on differences)
Date: 2006-01-20 09:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 06:30 pm (UTC)/Jesper
You make Japan's cities sound less scary
Date: 2006-01-20 06:39 pm (UTC)I am fascinated by your take on cities. Cities are, well, fascinating, though I tend to get very overwhelmed by them. I am more of a small town girl and I have been blessed to come from a very creative town, which, as I travel, I realize isn't the norm.
But I wonder how all of this traveling and moving effects you. Do you ever feel rootless? I know you talk at length about feeling like a global citizen. Do you find that the constant moving encourages a simpler life-style? (as opposed to perhaps a life more stuffed with stuff, which is possible when one has a house and doesn't move) What do you think about roots and rooted-ness?
-N
Re: You make Japan's cities sound less scary
Date: 2006-01-20 09:44 pm (UTC)As for roots, I think they can be elective and synthetic. You can decide what you want to be rooted into. We have a culture of origin and a culture of destination, and it's okay to be somewhere in between them. (Actually, this happens even if we don't leave home, because time changes a local culture into a foreign one too.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 10:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 07:39 pm (UTC)So...this is what life is like when you don't have kids!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 09:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:11 pm (UTC)Ah! Yes, I remember things like...going out for a drink...the cinema...sleeping late...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 09:41 pm (UTC)As a man I have the advantage of waiting 'til I age and then see if I want to have them or not.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-20 11:46 pm (UTC)Walking about with Gmap-pedometer
Date: 2006-01-20 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-21 04:27 pm (UTC)