I spend summers in Tokyo. Commerce, modernity, the world’s greatest city and sybaritic comfort – Tokyo is magnificent, exciting, clean, safe and quiet.
The photo on the right is Shibuya corner many years ago. We live within a easy walking distance of Shibuya corner and go there regularly.
My thinking for now is about the right metaphor for the significance of commerce. The problem is to find a metaphor that conveys the size of commerce in the world relative to everything else, the dynamic explosion of commerce over the past 150 years and the engulfing quality of commerce.
There are three metaphors that each partially work -- a great mountain, a great river and the Hawaiian Islands. The mountain works because we Americans and Japanese are on the top with other industrial nations on the side. All other institutions, academia, government, religion are small hillocks around the bottom. But a mountain is not dynamic and engulfing.
A great river has the power and engulfing qualities. A great river puts all other institutions in the picture as small backwater eddies. The explosive quality of commerce only comes in if we think of spring floods and rain storms. Nothing about a river metaphor conveys the newness of commerce.
The Hawaiian Islands are new mountains, with active volcanoes and they rise miles above the sea floor. But the whole image requires too much knowledge of geology.
What is a good metaphor for the role of commerce in the world?
(You can click on any photo for an enlargement)