Tokyo Moments

Tokyo Main(Sky)Line

Tokyo is concrete, electric, sublime, frenetically interconnected in ways neural synapses are jealous of. Though after a while of prowling the backalleys and neon-lit boulevards, the tiny 5-seat bars and the swanky Roppongi clubs, the Ginza haute couture, the Harajuku freak show cosplay and the Kabukicho sexshops you slowly start to realize there is a disease running rampant as a misguided synapse, a freak malignancy most people have that they live with in silent submission, or maybe it’s remission – the look-busy-while-not-actually-doing-all-that-much-disease called isogi-byo. Though I do realize this sickness could be an epidemic in the making in every major metropolis, what I see before me everytime I forget where I am when I awaken is a rapidly aging country of 125 million conformists with particularly bad strain of the virus who have lost their bliss. That or never followed it in the first place. The disease is spreadable by coming in contact with too many hungover salarymen, commuting via the vast network of sardine-can packed trains and subways, everyone hypnotized by their supercharged mobile phones (keitai-byo) and/or the latest ipod, where smug perverts (chikan) feel up Louis Vuitton ensconced women or are accused of such and won’t doing anything about it, working 3 parttime jobs (baito-byo), milling about in coffee shops between jobs, snapping photos of people who I think I’ll never see again, yet constantly do, tumbling around Shibuya with the rich teenagers and buying beers and Chinese Tangerines for the bums laid up against Gap and Banana Republic, and then comes the rain, trying to wash all the Tsukiji fish guts down the drain, the Kabukicho multitudes of shy, unmarried men (hazukashi-byo) pouring out of sexshops open for business right behind Police stations and City Hall, where the public servants go to get serviced, the Asian version of the greasy spoon boasting whale sashimi, horse sashimi, what could be dolphin skin soup with grated garlic and ginger, empty Suntory and Black Nikka premier whiskey bottles lining alleyways you’ll never know, but from which you smell egg breakfasts at 6 in the morning at people’s shoebox apartments who are somehow familiar, you’ve seen them in a dream, you’ve known them in a past life, at some level somehow there’s a shared camaraderie, slowly watching the price of tuna rise above the price of gas and saying fuck it, ordering some anyway, eating it with disposable chopsticks (waribashi-byo) made from yet another clearcut forest in Southeast Asia which adds to the flooding of 1/3rd of Bangladesh, and overall getting blinded by the morning sun finally overcoming the rainy season clouds and 60s era neon so all this blurs together into a kind of silent beautiful despair. Rife with the gooey, sexy, glossy stuff, Tokyo is an addiction. We’re all mainlining.

Winterwear

Loudspeakers and bullhorns, explosions and genocides, ladybugs and dragonflies, breezes and whispers, mikan & cherry blossoms, soba and grated shoga, chrysanthemum sushi and ochazuke, bamboo and mini maple leaves…all these things intermingle whenever I think you might be slowly stretching out another one of your beautiful days into the coming spring nights warmer and warmer all the time. It’s nice knowing that regardless of voicemail and other illicit rambles lost in the ether and the inevitable email address shuffle, that you are in the world breathing beautiful light into people’s lives.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 20:14. It is filed under Blog and tagged with Cosplay, Harajuku, Japan, Kabukicho, Roppongi, Shibuya, Tokyo, Waribashi, Whiskey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.