City for sore eyes
Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:00a.m.
It only takes a second to spot a tourist in Tokyo. First you sense their enthusiasm permeating the whole street with its saccharine perfume. It’s disgusting. Then you'll see them looking up, sometimes on such an acute angle you wonder if they might fall over backwards. But the real give away, the only way to make certain of their touristic agenda, is to look at their eyes. Tourist eyes will be wide open, that’s a given, the whites glistening. The pupils will be feverishly darting back and forth. And they will most certainly be bloodshot and crazed.
How you look at a city says a lot. I view tourists with disdain probably because I am jealous of the way they see Tokyo. The longer you are here, the less you look up, around, or anywhere but down. Eyes down, head down; this is the modus operandi of the local walking through the city. Anything else is certain to waste precious mental energy.
Tourists invoke pathos because they seem to see this city as more of a giant game show than for the complex, mechanistic and often banal place it is. But don’t let that dampen your expectations; you can still believe the hyperbole about the city. Most of it anyway.
Tokyo is overwhelmingly sensuous and eccentric. Apart from a few minor clichéd setbacks (used panties are no longer allowed to be sold from vending machines - something to do with “health concerns”), Tokyo still manages to shock the senses with narcotic potency. At first you feel euphoria (the crowds! the neon!), later you feel exhausted and overwhelmed (the capsule hotel! where is it?) and finally you grow accustomed, even dependent.
After two years of living in Tokyo I was so eager to return to Auckland, lie on the beach and eat a range of cheeses. But after a week of relaxation back home I began to feel Tokyo withdrawals (where is everyone? where is my onigiri?). Sad results of having smoked the neon crack pipe for too long.
Donald Richie, a writer on Japan, described Tokyo as ‘the real Disneyland’. My landlord does the same, but less eloquently, “why pay for a ticket to Disneyland? You walk in Mickey’s house as soon as you step off the plane at the airport”. This is a city hysterically operating in all four dimensions. It stretches out horizontally, catapults itself vertically, expands into all available space and seems to claim a unique sense of time. It can seem like a complete mess.
Maybe that’s why the Japanese have so many words to describe mess. Not just any words but a specific kind of onomatopoeia called ‘gion-go’. Whereas in English we have inspiring words like ‘boom’, ‘smash’, and ‘plop’, these gion-go are a highly refined and very large range of sound words used to describe detailed sensations and images.
For example, at street level the city seems ‘bosa bosa’: unkempt, overgrown, flourishing (this word is also useful for describing unfortunate examples of morning hair). At other times the city can seem ‘para para’, in disarray and messy, with bikes, trash, and Asahi crates strewn across the sidewalk. Cross Hachiko crossing in Shibuya, or walk through Shinjuku anytime of day and the city is exhaustingly ‘bata bata’, busy, rushing to and fro.
Up Tokyo tower, seeing the city extend right to the horizon in each direction, you can’t see the trash, or the business, or the bad examples of morning hair. You see a new kind of mess, a kind of texture.
Up here Tokyo can only be ‘gomi gomi’, intensely pressed together, architecturally overcrowded, and filled to bursting. Kind of like a giant bookshelf which someone (probably a tourist) pushed over.
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Auckland sixth former Rachita Castelino is just one of six young people in the world to win a UNICEF/ World Photography Organisation award, sponsored by Sony.
The prize was to travel to Ethiopia for tuition and with the acclaimed photographer, teacher and philanthropist Reza. Rachita’s winning photo was taken in Mumbai, while she was seeing relatives.
Reza is a world renowned photographer, architect and humanist who photographs regularly for National Geographic magazine. Millions of people attend exhibitions on his work and three films have been made about him.
This is Rachita's blog, filed daily from Ethiopia.
Ethiopia Snapshot Entries
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