3ft Left 02 (2015/05) | Page 11

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