I was reading through my old diaries of when I lived in Tokyo and found this – what I wrote about living in Tokyo and the way it grows. Nice vent for an off-topic Sunday post:
April 2002
I’m taking a walk through the edge of Shibuya. I haven’t been in this part of town for a year but it has completely changed. This city is like some kind of growth. Like some kind of X-files virus, it feeds and multiplies as you watch. A whole lot of new buildings up, just as many leveled to be rebuilt again. The endless construction cycle of Tokyo – reinventing itself. Shibuya station is the same with a while new tentacle opened. Half a kilometer away from my platform but it is all station from here. At least it isn’t Shinjuku where there is no more room to spread, so instead it’s dug its roots deeper into the earth, with layer upon layer of subterranean platforms.
The question is of course: what happens when the big one hits. I hope to dear heaven above I am not down there when it does. There is a fatalistic attitude towards the next earthquake. It is definitely thought of as ‘when’ not ‘if’. It has always come and it is well overdue. And I don’t want to be crushed in that maze under the city.
That fatalistic attitude is core to this town’s thinking. There is no worrying about things that can’t be changed. There is no fight for what could be changed. These things are approached by a shrug and a ’shoganai’ (that’s life) – nothing to be done. This is something that catches as you stop fighting the world and accept it for what it is. Accept your position, your luck, your fate.
I am uneasy. I keep bargaining to be here a little longer with no earthquake. Surely I’ve been extending too long. Surely its time is coming.
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