I waited six months for that baby, but I didn"t wait six months for this next one. In fact, I"ve never shown another person this one, because I wanted to wait for a good one like the one above. All of a sudden, you realize how hard it is to wait until some breezy day after a long winter rainstorm so that the pollution clears.
However, I"m not nearly done. Many people think that, well, that"s the view from any observatory in Tokyo. Firstly, partly judging from the number of derivative photos from the same place, it must be one of the very best observatories. And second, you need to zoom with your camera for most people to even realize that there is a mountain back there. Too bad eyes can"t zoom. Where"s that mountain again?... Oh...Found it!
The previous photos are mine, but now let me show you some that I got from one of Vtower"s posts. Some amazing photos by the way! But, I"ve highlighted something... Look at the area that I"ve drawn a red line around. Hey...that"s called...THE REST OF TOKYO!
Hmm...let"s take a closer look... What, exactly, is this "rest of Tokyo" composed of? (Below, beginning again, are all my photos.) Oh, I"m beginning to see...
And Yokohama"s not that different:
Well, that photo above was better, but as we all know, we can"t fly around like a bird all day, every day. There comes a time when you have to get down to street level and actually walk around. I wonder what the vast majority of Tokyo, or any city in Japan, including Kyoto, for that matter, looks like. Let"s see some stuff from ground level. Oh...
Hmm...that was pretty bad. But it was a single building. Not all, or even the majority of a Japanese city could look that bad.......could it? Well, I read some things yesterday about Japan being the pinnacle of modernity. In one way, I couldn"t agree less. In another, I couldn"t agree more. If you call modernity as making a liveable habitat for contemporary people, I don"t agree. If, however, you define modernism like the architects do - as a sad period between classical and postmodern styles - then you hit the nail on the head. After reading these falsehoods yesterday, I decided today to take a walk around Tokyo. I wanted to call people on their false assumptions, or refusal to actually realize how far this place has become a wasteland...a ghetto minus most of the crime.
Today, I did my experiement, and the results are out for you to see below. So as not to be biased, I took a walk around an area I"d never been to before (on a nice clear winter day, no less). I didn"t know what I"d see, but at the same time, I knew what I"d see, if you know what I mean. I should note that I did see a few better sights that I didn"t take any photos of, but I also saw quite a few worse sights, that I likewise didn"t capture. In all, this group of photos represents, roughly, the average of what I saw just today on my random walk.
One of the most traditional-looking things I saw during my whole 1-hour-plus walk was this. Rusty corrugated metal is a pretty common theme here in Japan.
Gee, I"d hate to see number 2...
I was amazed, and I must concede some sort of defeat, with this last one. It"s an actual park, with some trees and a brook...even if you can see the skyline of doom just behind it...
I"m sorry to have to be the person to let you know, but that is the real Tokyo. To back up my claims of being relatively unbiased, I took two videos, each exactly 5-minutes long. One is on a trolley-type thing (which I"d never ridden before), called the Toden Arakawa Line. I started the video and let it run for the 5 minutes, and showed what was out the window. Not very biased in my opinion. You can make up your own mind. And the second video was started from the last station of the Toden Arakawa Line, with me walking in a random direction (never seen before), and filming what I saw. To my surprise, there were multiple temples, though again, in-between the horrid rotting boxes. I"ll post the links once the videos have been processed.
In Asia, besides Japan, I"ve been to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and China (Hong Kong and Shanghai). Nowhere else, besides Bangkok, have I seen such a bleak landscape. Singapore is the best, in my opinion, with tree-lined streets and protected historic quarters that have been saved from the bulldozer (even though central Raffles Place didn"t make it). Shanghai, too, with its tremendous growth in the 1920s and all of the glorious architecture that entailed, followed by war and a 50-year stagnation that saved it from drab 60"s boxes. Hong Kong"s stuff is cutting-edge. Somebody wrote on one thread that if all of the new buildings were put together in Umeda, Osaka"s skyline would look as good as Singapore"s. Firstly, that"s like saying that if Dick Cheney put on some makeup, he"d look as good as Jennifer Aniston, and secondly, I"m tired of people only looking at the tall buildings. Singapore has a hight limit, but on ground level, its downtown outshines almost all Asian competitors. I must say that even when riding from Changi Airport into town, and passing all the HDB flats, I breathed a sigh of relief! At least there were trees...flowers... At least it seemed like SOMEONE cared... I just wonder why the Japanese are unable to have the same thing. And do they not even care?
Japan is already turning into a has-been. Roppongi and Shiodome are trying to save it. Shiodome, in fact, is as beautiful an area as any contemporary city center, but Shiodome makes up less than 1% of even the downtown area of Tokyo. In my opinion, it"s not just skyscrapers that can save Japan. The city is too big to be completely filled with them. It takes half an hour by train just to cross downtown. I think that the places where people live have to be reinvigorated, with actual style used for smaller buildings...something that"s almost entirely lacking. I see some signs of a change. I hope it comes about. We shouldn"t just give compliments to Japan without giving its cityscapes very critical looks. It does the Japanese no good, in fact. We shouldn"t let the government get off continuing to degrade the landscape. Someone should speak up.
Now, with everybody convinced that I hate Japan and Tokyo, I probably can"t make you believe otherwise. But before you argue with me, remember what you"re arguing for. Do you like what you see? Or do you want a change? If somebody had argued with Elvis when he went into a downward spiral of drug dependence, he might not have died on "the throne". Sometimes, if you love someone or something, you gotta tell them what"s wrong and check them into rehab. That"s what I"m trying to do with this country, because they"re continuing, even in Kyoto, to destroy every last bit of their history and culture and replace it with...well, you"ve seen for yourself.