Dear John,
Today we spent about two hours roaming the Otsuka furniture store in Shinjuku like unsupervised children. The upper floors were all filled with over-priced and uncomfortable Eurozone sofas and domestic lounge suits with vaguely cultish names like “The Harmony Collection” and “Domani”.
I could smell the leather tannins in the air.
Some guy was passed out upon the ¥400,000 Italian corner sofa job with The Sleep of Reason and a gloss-laminated price sheet decorating the coffee table in front of him.
We ended up here on a whim looking for a sanitised bathroom and somewhere to Sit Down. Part of it was also reliving a Christmas Eve date from over a decade ago when we last came here. Back then “we” had no money whatsoever, but liked to think we had taste. We browsed the Danish light fixtures, tropical hardwood tables, and fields of sofas and lounge chairs for a kind of pornographic satisfaction of the base desire for status symbols.
But once you peel back the cowhide leather or fabrique, it is all just the same junk on the inside: pine, velcro, and galvanised staples.
To be fair, I probably was not the target clientele. Some of the lounges could have been concept pieces for a Beetlejuice relaunch. Others were as nondescript as possible, with verdant pastél tonality for the discerning salaryman having finally retired from his forty years in the desert.
One of the large six-seaters impressed me in particular with its Tesla-like tackiness: white stitching on black spill-resistant casting-couch leather with a built-in beer cooler and bluetooth speakers.
The thing cost a mint, too. Maybe it was suitable for some senseless Yakuza boss, or maybe the ambassador’s inner chamber at one of the more marginal foreign embassies.
The thing was damn uncomfortable. Don’t make the mistake of designing how something should feel with your eyes. In this case the result was the kind of anti-human chirotonic spasm-inductions usually reserved for park benches or the seats in those fancy “Blue Bottle” Cafes.
We were not quite ready for the real world yet, so we went down into the basement where they kept the small appliances, whiteware, and televisions. I squatted down to inspect the Roomba robots (and the various knock-offs).
Are these not the most wasteful pieces of technology yet invented? Is this the pinnacle of man’s journey to conquer the Hobbesian State of Nature? The most supple application of the mind of the enlightened engineer?
Is a society that deems itself above cleaning its own floor doomed to annihilation?
Maybe there is a reason the monks sweep the sand every morning and we Baptise with the water of life - to clear the mind and to wash the soul? Who in their right mind ever thought “let’s get Roomba the robot to do it”.
I looked down at one of the strange black and silver machinations, wondering what kind of dumbed-down Palantir “deliver a missile through the window of a girl’s school”-style AI LiDAR tech they have in the thing’s cortex sensors? I wonder if it can operate on carpet, or if it basically requires an already clean and flat surface upon which to perform its routine? Does it “phone home” and let the CIA or Mossad or whoever know that I have a roughly rectangle-shaped living room? Maybe that’s how they nabbed Osama?
But enough about the robots, the thing that was really beckoning me from the back wall of the basement was the mesmerising kaleidoscope of 4K mini-LED 8-bit tru-color ultra-vision HDR-tone TV panels in all the sizes. I had not seen such a spectacle of light before as I was caught behind the doors of perception with no window to the outside world.
The televisions (that word sounds quaintly 20th century, is that what people still call these things?) were playing videos to demo the ultra-sharp pixel-perfect precision: elephants and zebras and birds on the savannah along with aerial shots of Tokyo and Yokohama at night, a train running through snow, and a close up of suspended glittering particles in some kind of viscous oil.
We both fell asleep to the gentle nourishing cacophony of the different televisions all playing their looping light shows slightly out of sync. The beeps and buzzes of all those other appliances gave the feeling of some vast spaceship autonomously heading towards a distant world. I briefly forgot who and where I was and wondered if this basement cellar might in fact be merely a dream inside one of those devices.
In a moment of lucidity I pressed the YouTube button on the remote. Firstly - where did that button come from? There was a NetFlix and Prime button, too.
How many decades have “Smart TV’s” been a thing? Is this what it feels like to be old and out of touch?
I have not owned a TV since I lived at home, and so now they are a kind of curiosity to me, a glimpse into the culture of a world that is quite strange though not completely unfamiliar. Despite this foreign experience, I was still surprised to see that these windows into reality were unable to escape the clutches of being always-connected.
In YouTube all I could think to do was to search my own name. Of course – it came up with my show: The Transformation of Value, and before it even started playing I was given two 15-second advertisements. But the more shocking transgression was seeing my own face on a 40inch screen and hearing my voice, auto-dubbed into Japanese and blasted out from a hidden place.
I am on a humble budget for my show, and so am somewhat self-conscious that my work does not blow up to 4K as nicely as the Sony footage of the Elephants copulating in Kenya, but then again - it should not matter.
It is the idea, the development of a new thought, that is important - right?
Freedom, money, creativity. Those are the questions I am supposed to be thinking about, along with what is happening and what is the thing that happens next.
But what even is a new thought, John? Sometimes it feels like we are all just as senseless as those Roomba clones, which if left to their own devices end up just smudging cat shit around the floor like a microwaved brown crayon.
Is such a thing as a new thought even possible in 4K mini-LED 8-bit tru-color ultra-vision HDR-tone?
We left, not because we wanted to see the true light of the surface of earth, but because I needed a coffee. Just around the corner a carnivalesque protest was making its way down Meiji-dori in fanfare lined on both sides by police cadres. The white hats and the red flags protesting the Iran war and the yanks and their war machine could be no other than the Kakumaru-ha AKA Japan Revolutionary Communist League.
They chanted their slogans, but lacked enough English signage as to make real sense to the dazed tourists whose tax-free onitsuka-matcha-pikachua shopping binge across the street was inconveniently interrupted for a few minutes.
These were the same octogenarian’s who opposed the Vietnam war and the Yanky occupation of Okinawa. In the old days they were known to pick fights with the police, so here they were escorted by probably a hundred fresh-faced cops filming them and book-ending the short stream of geriatrics between large police vans.
I guess it is probably the best time of year for a protest.
Just yesterday we went to a completely different silent demonstration in Sakuragi-cho in Yokohama. One of our friends was volunteering to organise. We stood in front of the station in silence holding up placards gently reminding passersby that Japan, at least on paper, has an anti-war principle baked into its constitution:
Article 9: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
This group is mostly young people, connected on twitter, and coming together for these kind of pop-up demonstrations. Their main dig is against the changing of the constitution that is being pushed by the Government (and might even go to a referendum next year). They are calling for Ice Queen Takaichi to step down for daring to even consider such a thing.
Why do politicians always try to fuck things up?
Some people might find it easy to brush it all off, to read some article saying that the youth of Japan are apathetic. But I can see that at least in some quarters they really have taken to heart the idea of that constitution: peace.
What the does that word even mean?
I guess it must be easy to forget the lessons of the past.
Last weekend we had trundled along to yet another demonstration in one of the parks in front the National Diet Building. 36,000 other people had turned up, too. I nestled my way to the front and heard the impassioned speeches as people reminded us what happened last time Japan went to war.
It seems like a lot of people when you are there but is it just a drop in the ocean. I wonder, is everyone else too busy doing something else?
Can there be revolution (or anything?) if the youth are not interested?
I don’t know who actually watches TV anymore? They are all on their phones these days. Maybe they are just mucking around, but then again maybe they are organising stuff like this.
– Cody