Back, japan, drunk

Someone told me before I left, that coming back to NYC from Tokyo, was like coming back to a third world country. So true. There is a certain, unavoidable comparison that happens when you travel between cities of comparable size or spectre. There is also a bizarre acclimatization that can happen. For instance, NYC to Hong Kong. Crazy, but not that crazy. Chinese city to Tokyo? You can only stand in amazement at the difference a couple hundred miles can make.

This is the first time I have really thought about the possibilites of living in a different city. There is something that is now so familiar about the NYC way of life. The way you order a bagel at the deli, the endless restaurants which offer a skirt steak, a roast chicken, a fish, a pasta, 4 salads, and some brucetta.

Japan is an island of painful exactitudes. I don't really know where all of the precision came from, there must be some sort of paradigm set in the momoyama, or asaksa, or edo period or one of those, when they started to just be more accurate than anyone else in the world. Its pretty ridiculous. I got these two earthenware cups from my mom. By my standards, they are about the same size, and are a set in my mind. They came in individual boxes, which were about 5mm different in width.

When I walked around in Japan, from Tokyo to the smallest town, I kinda walked around awestruck. Especially as someone who has spent the last couple years learning about how things go together, how they are made, and what it takes to make an object. Its not even that they have this intense pride for what they do, or make or what ever. It's not even a question. Electrical lines are strung with a huge amount of parts, there are fittings for sliding doors, manholes, street cars, just seem to make more sense.

One of the weirdest things to me, and I tried to explain this to some people, who were not in design, and they looked at me funny. But especially after studying Taxis, convincing the public to do things in a certain way is impressive.

Anyway, here goes. In every city I have been in before that has a subway, the subway has stairs. The subway stairs are divided for rush hour, into the up lane and the down lane. The stairs are generally 50% up, and 50 down. These percentages, I assume, come from wanting equal amounts of space for people to move. In Tokyo, its %30 down, 70 up. Someone watching people go up and down these stairs, realized that people going down the stairs go way faster. So in fact, the same number of people are going in both directions. People going up the stairs need more time and space.

I'm not sure why this is so genius to me, except to say that no stone is left unexamined. It reminds me a lot of Denmark, or vice versa in the sense that the planning is so well done, that there is no reason to buck the system.

Opposite to this carefully measured stairway is the Chinese roadway, where there is no center line at all. There are almost no road markings on a Chinese road, no crosswalks, no signs, in larger cities there are traffic lights, but in small towns, people are lucky when there is a curb. There are people walking, bicycles tricycles, battery powered tricycles, electric scooters, scooters, minibuses, buses, tour buses, taxis, scooter taxis, tractors (articulated engine exposed), trucks of all sizes, and everyone drives slow enough that you just pass people when you need to, you drive where there is space, and crossing this street is a very tricky proposition, especially at night. There is this level of common sense that pervades the people and the culture that encourages them to do what works in the absence of higher authority. There has been much scholarship, which I have not read, but a lot of discussion on why the Chinese accept communism as a government, and one of the conclusions is that the Chinese government has always been very big and bureaucratic.

There is a level of tenacity which the Chinese have, that the Japanese seem to have lost. Perhaps it is in some part due to the scarcity that is China.

This survival instinct that pervades China, has been replaced in Japan by what seems to be an endless childhood. Ola thought that the warning signs departments in Japan were either a room full of 1st graders, or aimed at 1st graders. From high voltage warnings, to dog poo signs, to drowning warnings, they all seem to be signs which are ready to be animated into the next pokémon movie. When you look at them, you start to understand better, what Murakami is talking about. You might even think that he designed all of them. This cuteness is perhaps what has infantilized the whole country.

I have to say that I drank a lot of whisky in Japan, and I spent a lot of time looking at the ice they put in my drink. In a certain way, This ice, is one of the ways I characterize Japan. You have never seen ice cubes, so large, irregular, and so PERFECTLY clear in your life. its like a small water clear iceberg was dropped into your glass. If I drank whisky 7 night in ten nights of Japan, I spent 7 nights trying to get a good picture of this ice. I don't know how they do it, but I went to have some nice cocktails with Silvia last night, and while the drinks were nice, the ice was incomparable. This is why Japan will always be at the forefront of aesthetic things in this world. They take the time to figure out how to make something as pedestrian as ice, PERFECT.

Just remember, in Japan, the sound of trickling water makes silence more silent.