Mind & Space in Modern Japan
by Theo Kogod
Though a swift stream is
Divided by a boulder
In its headlong flow
瀬をはやみ
岩にせかるる
滝川の
Though divided, on it rushes われても末に
逢はむとぞ思ふ
And at last unites again
Tanka No. 77 of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu
Written by Emperor Sutoku; Translated by Clay MacCauley
Ley lines of steel stripe the land, carrying people
over the electric roadways of Japan’s railroad grid, while
the blacktop brands its hot scars into the Tokyo streets
flanked by cobbled walkways. At the famous Shibuya
Crossing, pinnacles of glass and neon lights tower over
the intersection where people swell from train to
sidewalk to street and back, moving with the industrial
vigor of modern purpose. But when the Yamanote
Line opened its first railway terminal in 1885, Shibuya
was still a village run by a family of the same name. It
was the rails and roads which imbued this village with
the pulse of urban life, carried along the veins of track
that shaped not just the land, but the way Japanese
people used and understood their surroundings.
I can’t find such changes surprising. Japan’s consciousness has always been shaped by its geography. In
the Heian Period, emperors and empresses composed
waka poetry to celebrate the land’s beauty. To the
people, Fuji’s snow-capped dome and the surrounding
sea are no less important than the cities of Tokyo and
Kyoto. The country’s oldest surviving book, the Kojiki,
tells how the gods Izanami and Izanagi made the
Japanese Isles, but it was people who shaped those isles
into the place we know today.
There is a sense inherent in Japanese urban planning, guiding people instinctively along main routes.
At the Cherry Blossom Festival in Yoyogi Park this past
spring, drunkards stumbled under the eaves of a
pink-blossomed canopy, and though they were unable
to walk straight they still managed to follow the paved
blacktop paths as they ambled to wherever it is drunkards feel compelled to go when they are half-blind with
booze at 11am on a Sunday. The beauty of the park is
in its trees and spacious landscape, but also in that its
paths have been designed so that even the most inebriated can follow them.
People converge along the cobbles that flank busy
streets, using their phones to navigate, and the experience of moving through the city is dictated as much by
the wireless summons of maps beamed onto their
phones’ screens and the software of hyperreality as by
the concrete squares underfoot or the glass-faced
monoliths that tower like kaiju overhead.
People follow the prompts of storefront logos
emblazoned onto their consciousness by marketing
groups and the unseen signals feeding their phones,
and one wonders if the blue LED lights of our era
blaze even brighter than