Tokyo Won’t Let Me Go
Nearly a month in and I’ve written almost nothing about this place, which is its own kind of statement. Once you’ve adjusted to the talking toilets, the manga characters made flesh on every corner, and the unsettling normalcy of magazines with half-naked children on the covers, the compulsive urge to photograph everything and upload it somewhere fades. You stop documenting and start just living in it.
The routine has settled. Work happens in a couple of cafés in Shibuya—one of them has the free-drink, open-laptop energy of Berlin’s Oberholz, which feels like a joke the city is playing on me personally. Meals are sushi or tendon bowls from whatever place is nearest, with occasional detours to a burger spot around the corner that does the American thing without embarrassing itself. It’s a genuinely good life.
Shibuya I know well now. Harajuku I’ve fallen for a little—that particular mix of total absurdity and impeccable taste that makes you feel like you’re missing some gene everyone else here was born with. We’ve done temples and massive Buddhas and more One Piece merchandise than I thought physically possible. AKB48 grins at you from every poster, vending machine, and slow-rolling ad truck. And in a small bar one night, my favorite Utada Hikaru songs came on and I just sat there feeling embarrassingly at home.
The trip was supposed to end July 5th. I’m extending it. The visa allows me to stay until the end of August, my strange internet job travels with me, and Summer Sonic has Grimes, Perfume, Rihanna, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and SBTRKT on the lineup. There is no compelling reason to leave before any of that. The bad reason—habit, the feeling you should go back—is not convincing me.
This city feeds something I can’t name precisely, only that the energy here is both completely familiar and totally alien, like a language you somehow already dream in. Japan was recently named the world’s most creative country in an Adobe survey, which is the kind of statistic that is simultaneously very believable and completely useless for describing what it actually feels like to walk around in. Berlin will be patient. It always is.