A year ago, I moved some furniture across Tokyo. It was an, um, interesting experience. This time, I am pleased to say, things went MUCH better. I have now moved into my new place and am more or less unpacked[1]. I have also moved into my new office and am head over heels in love with my new iMac; so far so good! I’ll be hooked up to the internet at home again tomorrow (with any luck) and normal blogging service should be resumed then. In the meantime, here is a short post on the three-dimensionality of living in Tokyo:
We human beings are nominally three-dimensional, we don’t do much in that third dimension though, as we crawl around on the surface of our sphere. Occasionally we might venture up and away from the surface, or delve down underneath it but, as a rule, we spend a lot more time thinking about left and right or forwards and backwards than we do about up and down. Unless you live in Tokyo.
In Tokyo, shops are stacked on top of each other, and when you are trying to find a place you have never been to before, you have to remember to look up the side of each building as well as along the street. Shibuya station is built in the middle of a department store[2] and there are different train lines coming from different levels all the way from the second basement to the fifth floor. It’s mind blowingly confusing. Those trains, together with the expressways wind their way through, under and over buildings and streets and, because they are largely enclosed, the people minding their business on the street level, or in the shops, barely know they are there. My journey across Tokyo last week, with all my belongings in the back of a van[3], took us on one of these expressways. They are very cleverly designed with sound barriers and greenery to hide them from the residents. Sometimes, in order to make the best use of space, they are dug into shallow ditches maybe 10 feet deep, the sound barriers protrude, curving, from these pits, so you know the express way is there, but the gap in the middle is filled with parking, or bike racks or some such storage space that doesn’t need to be protected from traffic noise. On others, they arc gracefully above the city, the travellers unaware they are speeding across one of the worlds largest metropolies, while the busy residents below carry on equally heedless of those whistling by above them.
You know that episode of Dr Who with the endless tailback of hover vehicles ten layers deep stuck endlessly circling their three-dimensional city? You know, the one with Ardal O’hanlon as one of the cat people. Tokyo is a bit like that.
1. Ok, I am nowhere near unpacked.
2. This is not in any way unusual. In Ikebukuro you can take the escalator up to the second floor of the department store while next to you, further inside the building than you are on your escalator and on the other side of a glass wall, the trains trundle through.
3. With a roof, and one whole seat for each passenger, and a man who carried everything for me.
