Byline: Tokyo
The photo on the right is a square in Shinjuku called Studio Alta after the name of the building displaying the large TV screen.
What makes this Sacred Place 2?
Studio Alta Square is roughly in the center of a complex hub of trains and subways that enter and exit Shinjuku. The Square is on top of a station and a series of underground escalators, stairways and tunnels that goes down at least five stories carrying pedestrians, trains and subways. The area is too extensive to reasonably photograph and certainly too complex for the human mind to comprehend. The Square is metonomy for the entire complex.
What makes the Shinjuku transportation nexus a sacred place is that more people pass through it to travel to work and home every day -- over one million -- than any other transportation hub on the planet. Tokyo has many transportation hubs that bring 14 million people into the city daily for work, but Shinjuku is the largest.
And what is sacred about a transportation hub? This site is a reminder that commerce is the most successful motivator of human beings in the history of human beings. Commerce generates the message that gets nearly a billion people out of bed five days a week willing to work. We work year-in-year-out in the realm of commerce, for most of our lives and we do it voluntarily.
The system of commerce that generates this human output is beyond human comprehension and warrants sacred appreciation.
The photo above left is young women worshipping at the Studio Alta sacred site. They happen to be worshipping a rock band that is about to play. Most of the young women have been waiting for eight hours on a hot day.