March 18th, 2004
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Morning in Shibuya
It seems to be some kind of law that Shibuya never gets cold. The heat of a dozen train lines under narrow streets alone is enough to make even late January bearable without a heavy coat. I went to the city office this morning to change my address. The sky was a flat grey, but it didn’t feel like rain because the atmosphere was too dry. The stillness in the air was thick; the few cars that were around, muted and spectral. Even the crows seemed pensive, tired from a winter of panhandling.
Making my way north from Dogenzaka shita, I started actively thinking about the things I was seeing. A three story “hundred yen” shop, gutted, with some new chain store to take its place. Turning right on Spain Street, the Condomania and The Amsterdam, pink neon lights ablaze at half-past eight. A line had already formed outside a pachinko parlor, a scraggly line of gambler junkies, some standing with bags from McDonald’s (one with a tray). At the next corner, the worn carving of a coattailed man welcoming customers to a restaurant next to the ABC Mart. Steeper still upwards, past the hand-painted advertising mural so artfully done but frequently replaced. Past Popteen station, Nippon Rent-a-Car, shady hotels, piano bars and boutiques. And at the top, a middle school, where a handful of students practiced calisthenics on tennis courts to the instruction of several teachers- goofing off, doing well, feeling nervous. The large, overweight kid falling over to make the others laugh. The smallest, wiry one paying extra attention to fit in, and do as well as the status quo.
Pausing to watch for a moment, I remembered I’m in Japan. Japan! This isn’t just another big city in North America, or even Europe where everyone has the same music and base language. This is Asia, and the most eastern part, a country that shut out the West, opened its doors, and took on the world all in the span of four hundred years. A country so familiar at times it’s deceiving, but under a capitalist facade, so very different, a house of rooms extending farther and deeper into woods I will never know the end of. I shook off the complacency of being able to survive here comfortably, and felt again as I did when I first came- amazed. Amazed and thrilled and excited and fascinated, with a sea of possibilities and a far-reaching shore of stones look under. I think I would like to take a day off and tell no one, to just sit and wander around, watching, filming, writing, recording, capturing; bottling a small vial of the invisible gas here that makes me gleam.
