The Wired Jester

I was back in England late last Wednesday evening, and at work again the following morning. Hiding in bed is the usual thing to do after a long haul flight; taking cups of tea gingerly, dozing off every half an hour. Plunging into the normal routine, doing my usual morning commute was interesting because it made the contrasts between London and Tokyo all the more acute – as if I had torn sheets from two newspapers, mixed them and tried to read a continuous story…

It was the commute that struck me first. The tube seems incredibly small after Tokyo’s huge, stainless steel trains, and the business of Tokyo has to be seen to believed. When staying there, I was at my fiancee’s family’s house, which was in west Tokyo. A thirty minute train ride would take us to Shibuya, in the city centre, and one of the busiest stations in the world. I think nearly two million people pass through it every day. Tokyo’s transport network itself is huge, too – there’s an extensive underground, and an overground rail system (the underground map is here – Shibuya is to the bottom left.) The system caters well for English speakers – stations are labelled in English script and even the announcements on the train alternate between Japanese and English.

It’s the sheer business of the system that is overwhelming and overtaking, the sense of people all around, below, above and next to you – squeezing onto trains, spilling off them, coming from everywhere….

I think I am finally getting over the jet lag. Asmuch as I loved Lost In Translation, jet-lag in Japan isn’t always always full of gossamer-lovely longing. Sometimes it’s just plain knackering and involves a feeling like your head is full of silt that can come on at very random moments.

I’m here in Japan with my fiancee, and staying at her family’s house in Tokyo, which is a thirty minute train ride from Shibuya station. Shibuya is the place with the famous multi-way pedestrian crossing that you’ve probably seen a picture of at some point. Tokyo is one of the most densely populated places on earth, but you don’t really feel it until you’ve seen something like the Shibuya crossing in motion. In many countries, having that many people lining up, ready and raring to go would feel threatening – but in Shibuya there’s a controlled feeling to what happens, and sometimes, when you cross, despite being surroundd by people, you can feel quite alone – because everyone is in their own bubble… As my finacee says, the only way a station and area as crowded as Shibuya can work is that everyone knows exactly where they’re supposed to go, and when (see these before and after pictures at the bottom)…. The sociological view that Japan is a society that values (and demands?) conformity to the group might sound like a bad thing to individual Western ears, but as soon as you come to Tokyo, you get many sliver-insights into why it’s pretty much true, and also why people put up with it…

Good things are happening in the blog-o-sphere too: Boing Boing has
linked to my Sedlec photos, which is brilliant – it’s nice to have
contributed a little to such a good site as theirs.

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My trip to Tokyo has begun. Still slightly in the grip of jet lag, so am only going to post a couple of photos – anything longer would almost certainly not make sense… Click on the images for larger versions.