Tokyo
I've never communicated to my friends
who haven't been in Japan the immediate sense of relief that comes
from getting off the airplane in Japan. We come from a society where
there is a level of fear-induced tension that we rarely perceive.
Little kids don't walk or take public transportation to school in
most of America today. There are no more stranger abductions today
than in any decade over the past fifty years (sorry, that is a fact).
Yet we act as though there were. The tension is pervasive and the
relief upon arriving in Japan is exhilarating.
I use three photos to communicate the
safe and placid sense of this greatest of metropolises. The first on
the upper right shows two ticket dispensing machines where you choose
and buy the dishes of your meal at a working class fast food counter
(one of my favorites). You can put in a $100 bill, buy a $.95 salad
and get $99.05 change. From a machine.
On the left is the self-evident photo
that you have probably seen many times, young girls traveling by
themselves on a Tokyo subway.
The last photo on the right is a seldom seen shot of fishermen on a warm Saturday afternoon fishing in a Tokyo pond. The fishing pond is in the middle of a commercial district in the middle of Tokyo in the middle of Greater Tokyo. Greater Tokyo is on a plain, larger than the Los Angeles basin or Colorado basin plains, called the Kanto plain. Greater Tokyo has 43 million people; of these, 13 million come into the central area on weekdays. The central area is a small oval that would fit in Manhattan below Central Park or cover San Francisco. In the middle of central Tokyo is this fishing pond. The pond is in a canal that was built several centuries earlier to convey traffic by boat directly to the Imperial court.