Tokyo Babylon

I sit here at my laptop as Tokyo swelters in an another AC turbocharged roaster of a day. Passing by doorways this morning each couple of steps caused me to alternate between a cool breeze wafting down the street into my face and the warm blast of AC units set at a sweat inducing level to blow into my ear.

Below me as I type the traffic roars past on the double decker motorway, private on top and public below, a symbol born of concrete for how the world works for the most part. It’s roaring away 7 storeys below my window, like a fly incessantly beating it’s brains out on a window. It never stops. If it did, perhaps the whole sorry structure would collapse under its own weight, like a sclerotic Mercedes driver who hasn’t made it to his next triple bypass.

By day it’s just a motorway, a conveyer belt of mindless intensity and purpose. By night it’s neon artery of red bloodcells leading into the the insatiable heart of urban darkness. The cells that return are pale, anaemic, all vitality sucked from them during their passage through the jagged hypodermic landscape of the heart.

There’s something sinister about the way that people wait on rushing cars. The drivers themselves are mostly just a quickly forgotten blur imprisoned in the kind of freedom that confines more than liberates.

It is later now and I am sitting in a chinese restaurant in Hanzomon. A shiny, late model, mercedes comes to a stop across the road. A man gets out the back seat and fetches his golf bag from out of the boot, what Americans would call the trunk. His wife, dressed for a day in the country, moves beside him in her conservative dress and sunhat. The driver, like the golfer, a virtual icon of material prosperity waves his hand as he watches them leave in his mirror. I ask myself whether I would I swap places with these men? And the answer is no. There is in that scene something unwholesome. Perhaps it is the element of the dark faith; the carnal corruption of conspicuous consumption played out as a religion before my eyes on a Sunday. For me it’s almost Faustian and so I look away feeling profoundly troubled. It’s Hanzomon, the middle of Tokyo, a hop, skip and a jump from the Imperial Palace, but being an office district it’s seemingly uninhabited. The buildings are dark and closed so tightly that you could almost imagine plague signs on the doors. Here and there quiet people walk alone, on their way through to somewhere else, almost as if they are afraid to stop. Some streets are entirely deserted, no cars move. It’s The Day the Earth Stood Still with Japanese subtitles.

I frequently write about the hidden costs of the convenience. Cars are a case in point. Contrary to popular belief in a country like Japan or most of those countries in Europe where populations densities are high cars probably reduce freedom rather than add to it. I cant help but smile crookedly when I watch the latest commercial for the latest car which shows empty roads and the prospect of virtually unlimited speed, enough to speed away from a collapsing mountain or an oncoming tsunami. They’ve obviously never seen the highway below my window.

In vast spread out nations like the USA it makes a lot more sense. Measurements are different in large countries. As someone once said “In Europe a hundred miles is a long way. In America a hundred years is a long time”. Leading on from the barbed cultural exchange of that particular homily it may come as a shock to some people, especially Americans, but I can’t drive. I never learned, and never really felt the need to though this may change as technology catches up with my delicate social and environmental sensibilities.

When I lived in the UK I could always rely on public transport, friends and the occasional sleep over to give me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I’ve never really seen the attraction and pretty much always figured it was something to help you pick up girls when you were single and to transport kids after you were married. I would sometimes joke that not having a car made it a matter of some urgency that I fall for a nice girl who did. I am also against drinking and driving, but being a non-driver it is an easy position for me to take.

Moving on from that personal note to something broader it’s been apparent for many years now that the choice facing humanity is whether we want cities to be for cars, or whether we want them to be for people. Urban sprawl is car friendly but not pedestrian friendly. Narrow streets between tenements are pedestrian friendly but not car friendly. It’s pretty stark. However, high density living means all sorts of services are cheaper. Pipes are shorter, Postmen and schoolkids can get by on foot. It’s a simple matter to wire a neighborhood with fibre optics.

Then of course there’s the pollution problem. Petrol whether it’s burned in an engine, dripping out the bottom of a car, advertising the station on the corner before you turn it, is pretty noxious stuff. You’re taking stuff that kills everything it comes in contact with and spreading it around the place where you live. It makes your children cough, it ends up inside your lungs, crosses the physical barrier into your bloodstream and into your tissues. It blankets our farms and kills our oceans. In many countries the leaded varieties continues to retard mental capacity.

But perhaps that will change. There’s a car company called Tesla Motors that make a 100,000 dollar electric sportcar. I still wont be a fan of cars, because I like cities built with people, rather than cars, in mind. But it’s a start. They’re going to build family cars later. When I’m in my self sufficient home I might have TESLA in the garage, but I’ll have to be out in the middle of nowhere first.

http://www.teslamotors.com/