Tokyo Babylon

My initial inspiration was to write about how gardens and farms high up on roofs could transform a city from a hellhole to a paradise, and how some of the changes that their presence in the community would call into being would be the beginning of something bright and wonderful. It made me think of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but it also made me think of the Whore of Babylon.

Right now Tokyo is no different from most cities. It’s dirty. It smells. It looks awful. It’s barren. It wastes most of what it takes in from outside itself and then converts what little it does not waste in processing into garbage and pollution. I think of it as an machine, the very inefficiency of which leads me to suspect that it could best be defined as a pollution engine. 

People who want to make Mars a habitable planet talk of dropping huge pollution machines down to the surface and spewing crap forth day and night so that it will create a greenhouse effect that will warm the planet sufficiently for life to take hold.

Why not just drop a major City, like Tokyo, on Mars? say I. It provides more pollution per buck than any machine ever could and does it while those who manage it rest easy in their assumption that it is efficient, or at least convince most of the rest of us that it is the truth.

I don’t hold with the word ‘whore’ as a rule. I find it is generally applied to women who have done nothing worse than make an unhappy man happy for a short period in exchange for cash. It’s loveless but still, you would have to wonder at a world where the word whore is seen as being a term of abuse when soldier is often used as a term of praise.

He’s a soldier. Soldier on. Expressions such as this bely the purpose of a soldier which is generally to stick a gun in someone’s face and sometimes to pull the trigger. Granted soldiers are a necessary evil but can the same be said of whores. Pause for a moment and consider your reactions to the words I’ve used. The kind of love that is shared between a client and a whore is not the love that most of us yearn for, but neither is it the abbatoir. 

In any case while I would never call a woman a whore because of the societal and cultural associations that go with the word I would say that Tokyo is a whore and say it without reservation. It’s low, it’s mean, it’s putrid, it’s a cancer of its environment. Actually, pretty reprehensible in every way.

But it could be a garden when you think about it. True there would have to be some pretty major changes but there’s nothing impossible about it. Imagine a combination of “every journey begins with the first step’ and “many hands make light work” and you’ll appreciate the power of community action. I’ll talk about how community and communism have common roots in the English language later perhaps..

Indeed, if you read a book on Innovation like Frans Johannson’s “Medici Effect” you will read a lot about how good ideas spread like viruses. Just as an example, If you had been in South Korea when the first PC game room opened you would have in the a few years seen thousands break the dull and drab existence of Korean existence like a harvest of hope. It was a neon signed testament to the ability of people to take a good idea and spread it faster than Bubonic Plague.

Now the difference is that PC rooms are really just another way to divert people from the drabness of their existence so as to maintain their sanity. Anyone who has seen the way that Korean TV takes the lowest common denominator and then proceeds to cut that in half will appreciate what I mean. Programs with the intellectual stimulation of American Gladiators are the rule not the exception.

Now imagine a virus like that except that every infection is vaccination, every garden a cure, every farm a renaissance. Think on how it would feel to walk up to your roof on a balmy summer night to luxuriate in the shared experience of being surrounded by green like seeds in a kiwi fruit while looking up at the vast oceans of space, and feeling in the silent moment while everyone is sipping that first beer that you are not insignificant, you are not alone and that your actions can make a difference.

 That for me is the inspiration for this blog and the meaning behind Tokyo Babylon.