One Bit of Shibuya, Five Euros, Mine

The yami-ichi—literally "black market"—is a Japanese concept applied to the internet: drag the web out of the digital and back into the physical. Print your glitches. Sell your memes as objects. Charge money for things that have no monetary value and shouldn’t exist in analogue form but, as it turns out, do.

Berlin hosted its first one last Sunday, staged as part of the annual Transmediale festival, and people came from everywhere. Tables covered in printed error messages, stickers encoding political frustration with GEMA (Germany’s notoriously aggressive music licensing body), objects that were jokes and jokes that were objects. The whole thing felt like a flea market in a parallel internet—one where the commodities were aesthetic and the pricing was surreal.

I bought a bit from Shibuya. One bit. Five euros. Shunya Hagiwara, a Tokyo-based artist, was there with his girlfriend and their small daughter, the three of them making cotton candy while selling certificates of ownership for individual bits of neighborhood data. I don’t know exactly what I own. The certificate says I own a bit from Shibuya, and I choose to believe this is legally binding.

Something about this genuinely moves me and I’m not entirely sure what. Maybe it’s the cotton candy. Maybe it’s the idea that a family flew from Tokyo to Berlin to sell five-euro pieces of nothing at a festival about the internet. Maybe it’s just that I now own a piece of Japan. Officially. Documented. Filed.