There's Always Someone Coming At You In Tokyo

There is always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

You need to keep your head on a constant swivel. Twitching your head from side to side before taking too many confident strides. You never know when a mo-ped, bicycling hipster, drunk salaryman or teeny bopping ipod nano user will be on a crash course to take you out.

The moment you step out the door, hold your breath and take the plunge.

People come at you when you leave the elevator.

People come at you when you open the fridge.

People come at you when you go to the bathroom.

Flowing, rolling, sprinting, stunting, fronting people, all coming at you.

Too many fishes in this sea. You’re breathing their air. They breathe this air for you. A giant coy pond, everyone waiting for a morsel, waiting for a soda, waiting for a coffee, waiting for a cab, carrying umbrellas and suitcases.

Scurrying, hurrying, furying.

It’s open season on personal space.

Doesn’t exist.

Your space is my space is her space is their space is his space.

Communal personal space.

People come at you when you take a bite of food in a diner.

People come at you when you pick a song on the jukebox.

People come at you when you open a magazine.

If you cut a piece of steak, watch out cause it might end up in someone else’s mouth.

If you hail a cab, look out cause someone else might get in it.

If you pump your fist, hold up, cause someone else might say ‘oh yeah!’

There’s always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

If you make a cutting edge piece of contemporary art, watch yourself, cause someone else may swoop the credit.

If you DJ at Air, hold onto your street cred, cause someone else might do your scratching.

If you’re slurping ramen, clutch those chopsticks, cause someone else might be eating your noodles.

If you’re writing a blog, grab your iphone, cause someone else probably just posted it.

There’s always someone coming at you in Tokyo.

Sketches of Akihabara

I was chillin in Akihabara, or Akiba as the people who want to seem like they know a lot about Tokyo will say, and felt woefully out of place as I was the only person without a Playstation portable in my hands.

I bowed my head, mimicking the body language of the locals and tried to pretend my iPhone was a PSP. But it was just fakery, and not immersion, as I was too aware of my surroundings and conscious not to bump into the other loafing gamers.

Instead I just started to count the number of times I was collided into by a drifting PSPer. (by the time I caught the last train it was around 7. not counting the station madness)

Getting deeper into Akiba, I started popping into random shops, looking for insights into this mecca of geek and tech culture. Most of the bin sized shops I poked around in had barely any offerings that were recognizable. There was never a full computer for sale, but instead shelves and boxes of components. I didn’t know what I was looking at.

In another, more prime time area is was all large A/V shops and maid cafes. Sheepish looking salarymen clustered near the openings to the cafes, taking a pause from their PSPing just long enough to peer around to see if anyone was watching. As soon as they noticed everyone else was fully immersed in slaying dragons they would scurry up the stairs with the frantic shuffling of a classic nerd toting a briefcase.

Maids stood on the streets, with perma smiles, looking like video game avatars, no doubt enticing for the set that calls Akihabara home. I headed past them and into one of the giant A/V megastores.

All megastores I’ve ventured into in Japan have the same feel. The aisles are narrow, the products are many and arranged randomly (rows of potted plants sold next to rows of laundry machines.) and they feature the same audio scape. One sound signature of Japan is lightweight midi music adaptations of 1980’s American pop songs. (Think, the digital symphony of The Legend of Zelda performing ‘Danger Zone.’) Another sound signature is some guy yelling in a shrill voice through a small cone, even if there is a crowd gathered mere feet in front of him.

In the end, due to the assaulting cacophony of sound and the illogical arrangements of product, I forgot entirely what I was browsing for. I think it was a fake palm tree, or at least they seemed really appealing on this night tucked right next to the unaffordably priced washer/dryer/tv/refrigerator hybrid space saver.

I went back out to the streets to find a ramen joint where I would be served by a human being and not a video game character…

Tokyo

Tokyo is jazz, hip hop and rock.

Tokyo is a fusion of art and commerce.

Superficiality and depth and meaning.

Tokyo is imitation and flattery and genuine culture.

A remix culture.

Bright lights and subdivided alleyways.

Secret basement bars beneath the Starbucks on every corner.

Shopping centers built around shrines.

Characters in costumes.

Ladies of the night and trophy wives with tiny dogs, also in costumes.

Tokyo is age old typography, modern photography, experimental videos and holograms.

All night bookstores and coffee bars.

Love-love hotels, last trains and treks back to ancient villages.

It’s the land of the last Emperor and the rising sun.

It’s custom belt buckles and wallets and suspenders.

Every texture you could ever hope to find.

It’s every era all at once playing in surround sound

from 30 million cellphones.

From the Fringes of a Typhoon

The wind and rain is equalizing us all in this concrete toothed monstrosity with neon eyes, steel undergarments and glass clothing.

This morning the whole city has turned into a painter’s palette. The salarymen are dripping into the yakuza which are melting into splashing puddles of girls dressed as maids running from camera toting bloggers.

No matter what your paycheck says, you’re getting wet today.

Transparent umbrellas are in bloom across the megalopolis. They don’t stop the incipient spray of ten million footsteps and a million whizzing cabs. We’re all caught in the run off gutter of our times.

The rain has dampened the cameras. No one takes a photo on a rainy day. Tokyo Tower doesn’t make a good postcard with water streaks streaming down the lens.

So climb back into your neon marked holes Tokyo. Cuddle up to your cubicle, have a riceball or two at your desk for lunch. Keep your head down, even inside it feels like its raining. We’re all just chilling inside this giant concrete cloud. Maybe we are the rain itself.

In a city where no one sees you, they see you even less today.

The subways have become submarines.

The taxis drive with no passengers. No one is out to hail them.

Everything has become automated. The cars could fly today and no one would notice.

The few people you see are scurrying like spiders looking to return to the safety of the crack in the wall.

Dreams are melting. Hope is put on hold. You can do all your chores tomorrow. Have another riceball with your self pity.

My umbrella blew inside out. Sometimes we all get exposed. To the elements. To our fears, our enemies. To an old woman getting splashed by a taxi as she is spraying a hose on the ground, washing it like she does everyday, oblivious of the record rainfall. 

Some people are unprogrammable. That’s her routine and she’s sticking to it.

In a city this size, it pays to be part robot, part Zen monk.

Let the splashes pour over you and purify you like holy water. Let the umbrellas gouge your eyes in some sort of faux-spiritual sacrifice of enduring pain and turning your cheek. Let the disgruntled office drones bowl into you and take it. Take those elbows as cordial handshakes. Take those subway station bodychecks as hugs from family members.

These tricks help the rainy day blue to pass until the clouds and spray and runoff lift and you are free to resume your blue skied dreaming in all its grandeur.

Tokyo: The Attention Deficit Capital

As a city, Tokyo’s mind wanders.

It’s attracted to shiny things. It has trouble focusing on one thing. Which makes it a dynamically shifting visual wonderland.

Tokyo’s fashion sense drifts and changes course on a whim. You see a shirt you like, and you better gobble it up, cause when you head back to the shop a few days later, the contents (and often actual store design) will have changed completely.

There is no Tokyo Summer 2009 collection. Storefronts swap out on a weekly basis. Each week brings in a new fashion season. Occasionally one of the big, international brands will keep things up for a month. But after a couple weeks you start to hear rumblings from the locals that they have gone stale and are no longer innovative. Danger zone.

Walk in to most clubs and you’ll be assaulted with projected images that flicker at more than 120 frames a minute. If MTV, and the rise of music videos decimated our visual attention span by increasing the average cut rate to once every three seconds, what is this kind of Tokyo visual flickering doing to us?

If an image can’t even be fresh enough to stay embedded on the wall for a full second, what is going on?

Is there still a strength in the lasting power of the individual iconic image?

Is there a singular poster that could stand as a visual anthem for this city? I think it would have to be a multimedia poster, that involved lasers, mirrors, a fog machine, a disco-ball, techno music, and it would change the shirt it’s wearing every few seconds. Hmmm, I guess there is not one singular poster we could make.

It’s the embrace of the ANTI-TREND. What little thing can you do that no one else is doing? Wrap your left arm in tinfoil. Wear your socks inside out and pop them on the outside of your pants, or wear short pants so people notice. Graft three bills onto one hat. You name it, and someone hear is trying it.

I felt weird the other day, when in a city of tens of million, I saw two people wearing the same shirt, with the same blurred image of Pac-Man. Usually, everyday consists of walking by thousands of uniquely different graphic textiles.

The only visual trends I recognize are when a new store opens, take, Forever 21 for example. The streets will be taken over by a marching army of high school girls all toting the same bright yellow bag from the store. But that’s it. The city won’t decide, can’t decide on anything beyond that. Shopping is the ever trend. Some call it art. I’m not drinking that kind of kool aid.

Shopping will never be art. The people who create the fashion, the designs, are artists. The people who consume, and decide to buy them are curators. They are art collectors to a degree. But unless they are creating an output of their own, commerce is not a creative act. It is just feeding the frenzy of the collective attention deficit of the city.

I like the scattered attention, because when I walk the city, I feel like I’m experiencing a visual playlist set on shuffle. I never know what will pop up, but I know it will have some style and thought behind it. I find it inspiring. I always carry a notebook because coming across these random things, these shifting things, sparks ideas that I want to carry out.

Browsing and sampling is fine, just as long as the shiny things don’t suck you in and make you forget your personal creative mission.

It is a neon Alice in Wonderland tunnel that can consume and take you as its own.

Be true to your school.

Being Tall in Japan

The number one question I get about living in Japan is ‘So do you like feel really tall there?’

Yes.

There are plenty of restaurants that I can’t fit my legs under the table in. It reminds me of my days working in a pre-school when I would sit in the tiny chairs and just keep my legs to the side. Effectively riding side-saddle. Many of these restaurants also have sections with lower ceilings, so I have to bend over to even reach my seat that I won’t be able to sit in properly. And yes, I can tell you are laughing at me sir as I awkwardly fumble into position.

As far as low ceilings go, a few of the apartments I looked at made me feel like I was John Cusack stumbling upon the four and a half floor. After seeing a couple of these, I didn’t need to check them out any further after opening the door. I opted for a space with an 18 foot ceiling. I don’t feel tall at home. It’s nice.

I feel tall on the streets when I pass a little old lady and she violently turns her head upward, mouth agape (sometimes letting out a terrified shriek.)

I feel tall on the morning subway when I have ten people using my chest as a pillow as they snooze on their commute. I don’t feel as tall on the subway ride home, less people and the ceilings in the cars are actually pretty high. Higher than I found in the London tube.

I feel tall when I’m at a club and the lasers from the stage cast a shadow on the back wall that reveals my shadow to be head and shoulders above the moshing masses.

I feel tall when one of the first questions people ask me is ‘Whoa, how tall are you?’ I don’t know how tall I am in centimeters, which is their standard, so my information isn’t much use to them. Sometimes I say I am eight feet tall, because they just have to accept it and I can snicker to myself.

I feel tall when I’m playing streetball at Yoyogi Park. Where I am the default big man. I want to stay on the outside and pop threes, but they wave me down below, wanting to make entry passes into me as they call me ‘Shaq’ or ‘Dwight Howard.’ Ironic. It doesn’t seem to compute that I am skinny to most. It’s like my tallness has blinded them. And for a guy with a lifetime of derogatory skinny nicknames attached to him, I’ll take it.

Well, speaking of the morning subway, time to go catch one and serve my daily duty of ‘sleeping pole.’

I’ll talk to you all real soon.

Tokyo Design

It’s impossible to narrow the essence of Tokyo design down to a single style. It’s a remix culture, that borrows icons and motifs from abroad and spins them in their own way. Usually these remixes are very clean and iconic, pattern oriented, making them ideal for the jump from pure design into wearable fashion.

But the trend of design I’m liking, is a more casual and less fashion ready style. One that mainly exists in the multitude of art mags you can find at the local shops and galleries. It feels to me like ‘photoshop enabled photocopy art.’ And I enjoy seeing that style in a printed and bound volume.

It’s not an attempt at photorealism. It’s a kind of clunky surrealism, that goes for more of a mood than trying to augment reality. It feels very random, but in a visually striking way. Almost like the freedom of doodling in a sketchbook, but with fully realized images.

In Tokyo, there is also a solid mastery of a kind of perfect-imperfect typesetting. Letterforms that look so awkwardly placed, that you soon realize they could not be more awkwardly placed, therefore giving it a certain puzzle solving, eye-pleasing reward. Very ordinary fonts used in a way that makes them alarmingly ordinary. A rebranding of the taken for granted.

If Van Gogh was inspired by classic Japanese paintings, maybe the modern designer can be similarly influenced by the graphic aesthetic of Tokyo today..

Anyway, I’m aiming to post more bits of Tokyo design inspiration on here.