Donald Richie Blog

Reading Richie’s thoughts on Tokyo while reacquainting myself with the city was very interesting. I thought it was especially intriguing to see how many of the things he wrote about more than a decade ago are still very true, but also to think about a few of the things that have severely changed the Tokyo climate that he was writing about. When I say severely changed, I don’t mean that they made them wrong, but rather that the situations are quite different but the observations Richie made still hold true, just in different ways.

For instance, the advent of cell phones in Tokyo during the late ‘90’s would certainly have changed a lot of things around the city, both physically and culturally. Now, with virtually every Tokyo citizen being permanently accessible by email via mobile phone, the metropolis is not only a collection of villages, but an online network as well. Speedier communication only shortens the virtual distances between people, making information travel more quickly but also lowering the necessity for actual physical contact. The father who stays out to drink every night need not stray one step from his nightly prowl to contact the home and announce that he will not be there for dinner – he can do that on the subway.

In a city where a family or a group of friends may spread out to entirely different parts of town during the day, communication among these networks is still instant because of the cell phone, and especially because of cell phone email. One need not turn off their music player, step off the train, or even stop talking to someone face-to-face in order to send a quick message on the phone. Thus it has been made possible to spread out all over the Tokyo area while still keeping the tight social networking of a village. Physical space between people may be widening, but the virtual and social space is, if anything, closing down. America is too spread out for this to be the case – because of cell phones and email the virtual space between my parents in Ohio and my grandmother in Arizona is next to nothing, but it’s not like we can send an email saying “meet at Hachiko in 3 hours” and expect the receiver not only to receive that message instantly, but also to be within easy access to whatever the meeting place is.

Are Richie’s comments about Tokyo being a village, or rather a collection of villages, becoming outdated? I would say no – really, if anything, they are being strengthened. From my time in Tokyo last year, and the extra exploring I have done this year as well, I can say with confidence that any station within the Yamanote Line – and most likely any station for a ways outside of it as well – will have Pachinko, karaoke, a 100 Yen shop, and a collection of convenience stores and izakayas, at the least. It is also interesting to think, though, how each of these villages-within-the-metropolis could be thought of as its own gigantic store, or really mall; Akihabara is the electronics mall, Harajuku the clothing mall, Kabuki-cho the sex mall. Most of the Tokyo neighborhood-villages don’t necessarily have this kind of association, but it still gives an impression of the whole metropolis being one big village, where there’s one particular place to go for anything you might need. Everyone still seems to have their favorite bar, their favorite pachinko parlor, which they probably go to almost exclusively, but it doesn’t seem to necessarily have to be in one’s own neighborhood-village. For simple shopping people can probably find what they need in the appropriate shop in their own neighborhood, but if they are seriously shopping for something they might take a step up and shop not at their neighborhood-village’s appropriate store, but rather at the appropriate spot of the mega-village that is the whole of Tokyo.

This weekend I had a chance to experience a little of what I, as a Westerner (a Mid-Westerner, at that) would consider to be “nature”. I went to Futako-tamagawa to play Ultimate Frisbee with a group of Americans and a few Japanese – the field we played at was at the very back of a gigantic park on the bank of a river. I say a little of what I consider to be nature, but really only because there was an abundance of green, which in inner Tokyo seems to be an extreme rarity. At the park in Shinjuku where I am doing my 3 day exercise there are planters and trees, but everything does indeed seem to be planned, or at least carefully contained. A “park” in my hometown of Cincinnati would probably consist of a playground in or near a patch of woods. And by woods I mean actual woods, not just a few scattered trees – and it would probably only be managed as far as having a few trails through it would require. Futako-tamagawa was certainly less urban than Shinjuku, but this park was still entirely planned – all of this flat green space was entirely plotted for baseball or soccer, and the river bank even seemed manufactured both for a bridge for the trains and for easy fishing. This kind of park exists in American suburbs as well, but most likely accompanied by a backdrop of actual woods; here the backdrop was the usual forest of concrete that one associates with Tokyo. Even in Chiba, when I visited it last summer, the park I went to was entirely planned; concrete trails and gardens and mowed lawns. No freely growing brush, no dirt paths. It seems that, for the most part, the Japanese prefer something to look as good as possible, whether or not it is manufactured. In America there is a sense for “authenticity” that requires we have large plots of “nature” preserved from human interference. Whether this is an issue of difference in space or culture, or just a combination of the two, I’m not really sure. Although I suppose the space difference itself has an effect on the separate cultures as well.