flemmings | (no subject)

From all over-- 1000 things to miss or not about Japan. A woman who's lived there twenty years and is returning in 2012. (Mh. *She* says. People who stay longer than twenty years never seem to actually make it back. For one thing, what do they have to come back to, one wonders? It's like returning from the fairy mounds.) She's listing daily one thing she'll miss and one she won't about the country. And one can't argue with tastes, but some of what she says makes me raise a wondering eyebrow. Maybe I've been back too long, but I never noticed people standing on the left on escalators. People *standing* on escalators and not moving, yes, which offended my busy-busy Torontonian soul, even though the 'stand right, walk left' rule here has been decried as dangerous. You shouldn't walk on escalators at all, apparently.

Equally, clean toilets... In department stores, yeah, the cleaners moved in regularly. Indeed, in the train stations they moved in regularly too, which was a nuisance because then you couldn't use the washroom at all. But they *had* to, because squat toilets meant the stalls became disgusting in very short order. If Tokyo has been phasing out squat toilets in the last seven years I shall rejoice, and not believe it. In my day people in front of me in the line would happily yield me the western toilet when it came free and wait for a Japanese one. (And in fairness one must add that we manage to make almost as much mess with our western stalls and no excuse, except that people are probably hovering above the toilet seat and the female anatomy is no more designed for aiming accurately here than there.)

But mostly it's #7 on the Won't Miss--Urban Ugliness.

De gustibus and all that, but what city *is* beautiful? New York? No, brown and grotty and wonderful. Paris? Only if you like that sort of thing. Vienna? Not built for human beings, was my impression of it. Kyoto? "About as beautiful as Stockholm, which it resembles." Cars have destroyed most NAmerican cities; Europe is 'if you like that sort of thing'; and most Asian cities are a mess. Saying Tokyo is ugly is like saying Tokyo isn't green. Tokyo is very green-- down at street level, down at knee level, down where the humans are. NAmericans want rolling green lawns and great big trees (I'll admit to feeling the lack of great big trees, but they do exist around jinja) and *spacious* greenery. They don't want six shelves of bonsai plants and small azaleas sitting outside someone's front door. But that's how green is done there.

The Tokyo cityscape is eclectic and hodgepodge-- like their billboards and posters, riotous with four different scripts all going in different directions. No, it's not harmonized or designed to work together as an architectural whole. Paris is, which is fine if you like harmonized wholes; but I prefer ground-level Paris where the human stuff happens to those rows and rows of impeccable apartment houses. Why are Tokyo's little concrete boxes ugly? Because concrete is considered ugly by definition, I fancy, unless it's big enough to register as 'office building' or whatever. I loathe 34-storey concrete office buildings (and university buildings even more) but make it a three or at most four floor little structure and it becomes quite cozy. It wouldn't be as cozy if it were a /bunch/ of little concrete structures all the same style and colour, but it's not. Ceramic tile and the universal stucco and the occasional wooden front or aluminum siding sit side by side down the street, all individual and different. (Oddly, when you think about it.)

I grant you, I missed brick when I was in Tokyo; but I miss brick when I'm in any of Toronto's bleak strip mall suburbs. The cozy crammed disparity of Tokyo's umpteen zillion shopping streets and residential areas is much more beautiful than the bare wind-blown emptiness of eight-lane thoroughfares with identical apartment structures dotted here and there on either side of them. (Also, one need only step into a brick building in Tokyo to stop missing it at once. Concrete can sort of handle mould, especially with dehumidifiers; but 19C brick can't and didn't.)

That picture is everything I loved about Tokyo; that's the Tokyo I sing 'I Can't Stop Loving You' about, which yes dammit I do on occasion. It's the Tokyo I might have managed to stay in for twenty years myself if, like the blogger, I'd been married to someone, because Tokyo is a lousy place for an introvert to be by herself in. But I wasn't and I left after five years and that was that.

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It always takes me a day or two to get used to standing on the left of the escalator in Japan. And vice versa when I get home. It's so instinctual for me to to move to the right, going to the left is an effort. Ditto walking on the sidewalks, though in any sufficiently crowded area, say, Shibuya right around dusk, one just goes with the flow, whichever side that may happen to be.

And in the 9 years I've been traveling there, there's been a definite upswing of Western toilets. I've rarely, the last 2-3 years, had to make do with one of the traditional ones, even at parks or smaller train stations outside of Tokyo proper.

Urban ugliness? I'm with you that it's a part of any sufficiently large city -- but there's beauty too. I will grant that Tokyo is very disorganized -- I'm used to the (mostly) orderliness of DC, with its nice grid (except when it's not), which is why I'm always armed with maps to where ever I'm going (and I'm not above asking directions from policemen if I'm really lost).

To me, the sameness and interchangeability of American apartment buildings and houses and strip malls and shopping centers is far uglier than Japan's supposed ugliness. Japan has character; it looks lived-in; you're reminded that it's a much older country than the U.S.

I read only a few of her "won't miss" and although she's entitled to her opinion, it felt like she doesn't "get" Japan - even though she's there for 20 years. The Maid thing, etc - why does it even have to have any kind of psychological implication. I am rather irritated by her 'gaijiness' and I am sure Japan will miss her as much she will miss Japan.

I've been to a lot of cities - by far, Tokyo, for its sheer size and number of people packed into that sheer size, it's one of the most beautifully kept city. The clone-like young men and women there with their similiar coifs and outfits and designer bags -- totally different story.

But then, that's why I love visiting Japan and love living HERE. :D

why does it even have to have any kind of psychological implication

I think that's the thing that kind of boggled me. Expats and their isolated lifestyle aside-- and she certainly wasn't living in any expat apartment-- how can you live in Japan and not find it changing the way you do your thinking? 'Everything is significant and reveals some underlying psychological attitude' is a kneejerk western reaction. Read enough yaoi djs and eventually you realize that no, actually, it's not. A maid's uniform reveals only that maid uniforms are cute and therefore Good.

The human landscape of Tokyo is a bit of a problem, and the Tokyo life style, and a bunch of other things. It's different outside, is what I'm told. It'll never be Italy, but that may not be a bad thing.

See, it's older in its ways of doing things, but in a place where a ten year old building is *old*, to my eye it never looks as old as much younger places, even TO. (My house is a hundred years old. This shocks me.) But it feels like it's been crowded cheek by jowl for centuries, which it has. Wood in Edo, ceramic tile now, people always. Except in Edo there were large green tracts where the samurai nobility lived, and now people are crowded everywhere.

Short of a dump, nothing is as bleak to me as a strip mall.

Somehow I adjusted automatically, including bicycling on the left side of the street. Then again, they make you ride on sidewalks there, where there are sidewalks, an din my day the bicycle was still king.

But the *layout* of Tokyo is another matter. The rolling Edo drunkard made the rolling Edo road, and it goeth where it listeth to go. No wonder they despaired of a western address system. Maps and a compass and detailed directions if possible, is what *I* always took. But then I'd get to grid pattern Ginza and find it dull and without inspiration.

Maybe I've been back too long, but I never noticed people standing on the left on escalators.

This actually changes depending on where you are in Japan, which is what always throws me for a loop. Kinki, you stand on the left. Kansai and Chubu, you stand on the right. It's why I prefer Kyoto, which is something of a free-for-all.

As I say, my experience was that people stood both sides and anyone wanting to walk up or down the escalator was considered mad. And occasionally blocked by obstinate old men standing dead centre and not about to move for any damned gaijin. Always bemused me that people who'd charge the train doors wouldn't move a muscle once they got on an escalator.

I am also not immune to getting lost in a grid -- I've been as turned around in orderly Ginza as in any other twisty-turny maze of streets.

The best kind of Japanese map, for me, is one that puts landmarks on it, even if that's just the closest 7-11 or Sunkus ... and has North at the top. When

solaas and I were in Kanazawa, I was utterly stymied by the maps that weren't oriented with North at the top ... they rotated perspective. I had to let her do all the navigation because it was impossible for me to read them.

As one who got disoriented three blocks from home in youth, yes. Is why the compass.

You do know that Kanazawa is like that on purpose? Not the bit about placing north, I mean-- the one about even if you're oriented with your map, the streets don't make sense and you can't /get/ to the Gardens except by taxi. Defence against invaders in warring states period.

Heh. No, I didn't know that. It would've been very effective in stopping me. Nonetheless, solaas is a mighty navigator and we walked /everywhere/ around town.

Huh? But Tokyo is lovely, and the more lovely the more architecture and urban planning classes I took: not planned in the neighborhoods, but the original layout of the neighborhood plan, the spiral out from the Imperial grounds. It's the city they wave at urban planners to tell you that if you don't interfere too much it will all come right in the end, so stop trying to predict how everyone will use every single half-lot.

More bemusing yet are the people who, when they believe that you are standing on the wrong side, politely request that you move over so they can get by instead of just walking around you. Thing is, I often don't detect malice from them--it's as if they really believe they can't get around me unless I'm standing on the "correct" side.