Today to delay the onset of encroaching decrepitude I took the bull by the proverbial horns and went to get some accupuncture for my back. So I limped onto the train to Sangenjaya and went to Edward’s Accupuncture. I went there because I had bumped into ‘the’ Edward while exploring the area near my house for anything resembling a library with study space. Anyway, as I was walking through the park I saw someone doing tai-chi. Moving closer I was surprised to learn that the tai-ch practitioner was a Westerner, an Englishman in point of fact. We had a brief conversation very much in the British style, which is to say it was interrupted by rain, before like passing Gaijins we had to go our separate ways.
People who know I’m Scots might expect some cutting witticism at this point given the long standing antagonism that many Scots have for the English, but far from it. I quite like the English, even going so far as to not cheer for any opponent they might face in the World Cup, which when you consider the fact that I don’t eat haggis, drink whisky or play golf I sometimes have to wonder whether I continue to qualify as a Scot.
The English for their part seldom return this antagonism. I would put this down to mystification (though not in the US sense of ‘why do they hate us?’), benign neglect and the sense of superiority that citizens of large countries often have for much smaller neighbours.
Edward’s been here for years, at least a month for every day that I’ve been in Japan, and seems well adapted to the culture. He also strikes me as a gentleman which is another point in his favor since we are much thinner on the ground than we should be.
Anyway, I digress. It’s a celtic failing and, if you will forgive my piling digression on top of digression, not one I am likely to overcome in what is left of my span of years.
Back to the point, pun intended..
So there I was lying on a medical couch in a dimly lit wreathed in curtains. I had filled out a form which asked some very unusual questions for a medical questionaire, such as which foods do you like most, sweet, sour, bitter etc etc. And I was thinking about the holistic approach that Chinese style medicine, and indeed chinese style thinking, advocates. This differs from the Cartesian approach which is the norm in the Western world, since the holistic approach looks at how the system, the human body in this case, functions at the system level; the western, or Cartesian, way of doing it is to disregard the system and break down every problem into small parts looking for things like causality, cause and effect, action and reaction.
Thus with many needles jabbed painlessly into various parts of my pallid flesh, I considered how Tokyo could be changed for the better by looking at how the city works. You see there is linkage between the public and the private, between large buildings and small, between utilities and building architecture, it’s just that these things are not explored. However taking a systems approach to how things works often produces things that are more efficient than the sum of their parts. The big question then is how to do the number crunching at higher levels of complexity than 2+2=4.
I will continue this tomorrow. This pin cushion is beat, though this does not make me a punch bag.
