Still Hungry

There are speaking toilets here. That’s the first impossible thing you notice, and after a month it’s barely registered. There’s a whole aesthetic of strangeness in Tokyo—manga characters that look more human than humans, magazines full of half-naked teenagers, everything selling everything to everyone. But you stop seeing it as strange. It just becomes what’s there.

I’m not doing the tourist photography thing anymore. The first week you take pictures of everything because that’s what you’re supposed to do, then you post them and feel like you’ve captured something true. You haven’t. So I stopped. Started living instead. On The Corner and Wired Cafe in the mornings, The Terminal for coffee, Burger Factory around the corner for burgers that taste like regret. Sushi and tendon everywhere else. Shibuya I know by heart now. Harajuku caught me before I realized it was catching me.

The small stuff sticks. One Piece figurines in every window. AKB48 girls on every billboard and truck and vending machine, all the same grin. A bar where Utada Hikaru was playing—my favorite songs, just there.

I was supposed to leave July 5th. Simple enough. But the government lets you stay until August, and Summer Sonic is in August—Grimes, Perfume, Rihanna, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, SBTRKT. These are people I’d normally just read about. My job is strange enough that it doesn’t care whether I’m in Tokyo or Berlin. So I extended. How do you walk away from something feeding you like that?

Tokyo scratches something Berlin stopped scratching a while ago. Some kind of creative energy I can’t describe without sounding like I’m reading a guidebook. Maybe Japan really is the most creative place on earth. Maybe it’s marketing. I’m not going to find out by leaving early. I’m still hungry here.