Surreal Reading

The texts in the "Center-City, Empty Center" and "Seiburealism" posses great answers and insight for those of us that have entered this city scratching our heads. How many of us have been perplexed by the complexity and absurdity of the address system? But to approach a system apart from the western ideaology that rationality and efficiency go hand in hand is to be open to other systems of relation. Ignorance is the blindfold in this case for those that deny that Tokyo's seemingly cold mapping system in itself creates a very warm interpersonal relation with its people. Only after reading the handout did I realize that the vague help a map provides forces people, myself included, to draw a mental map of landmarks in order to distinguish one locale from another. In a precisely structured cityscape like a New York City grid you would not find the same kind of ingenuity within each person trying to get to a destination. In Tokyo everyone creates an individual connection with the city and has his/her own interpretation on how to get around. How a person directs another reveals what reflection the city has upon he/she and the details are a big part of each's character. I won't forget the quote by the Kabuki actor Zeami that was mentioned in the handout - "labored with more reserve than the mind, the fabrication of the address greatly prevailed over the address itself, and, fascinated, I could have hoped it would take hours to give me that address". The city's unstructured imprint would now seem in contrast to have more life than that of the straightforward exactness found in the efficiency of a western metropolis.
There's so much to appreciate about the "Seiburealism" handout. The observations couldn't be made easily unless one were a foreigner. I too have wondered why such a reserved and peaceful society, at the core, contained such violent and disturbing forms of stimulation. We are all animals I guess afterall and the thirst for blood must be quenched one way or another whether in a manga or on the streets. Hey, censors out there, you getting all of this?!! The example of change in the city while maintaining a charm from the past couldn't have been better given than in the description of the digitization of Mount Fuji. How the flashes of the great monument between the concrete stalks in the past are today replaced by the same flashes only now on the buildings themselves so as not to completely imprison the city from the country are part of a transition so subtle its existence is most probably known only to those that have never known the city to begin with.