Japan Is Dense…

I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They’re just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It’s kind of untouched, it’s not Americanized. Toni Collette

In Japanese culture, there is a belief that God is everywhere – in mountains, trees, rocks, even in our sympathy for robots or Hello Kitty toys. Ryuichi Sakamoto

For me, Japan is appealing because, unlike most non-European countries, Japan was never a European colony. The result is a first-world country that is completely unEuropean-based (or unAmerican-based, if you prefer). It is Asian all the way down and, at the same time, first world all the way down. More importantly, Japan works in a non-European way; sort of. Steve Jobs said that Japan is very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. By the time we left Japan, I was thinking about that Steve Jobs quote probably three or four times a day.

In Japanese cities, there are lots of overlaps with American and European cities – mostly European cities- but everything seems slightly different. It is the most user-friendly place I have ever been to. Japan is also the densest place I have ever been to. It is about 145,950 square miles, but about 73% is considered mountainous, so Japan really has only about 40,000 square miles where people live and farm. That is about the same as California, which is about 39,000 square miles, when you take away about 50% for mountains and 25% for desert. However, Japan has a population of about 124 million people compared to California, which has a population of only 39 million people (for reference, greater Tokyo alone has a population of around 39M).

Japan isn’t just dense because there are a lot of people jammed in, which there are, but because they have been swimming in the same culture for about twenty centuries. It is as if people were still living in all nine layers of Troy. Japan seems dense because that small area is jammed with the artifacts of its collective history.

One night, Michele and I took a taxi to Shibuya Scramble Square, a shopping center and station complex in an already dense area of Tokyo. We got out at what seemed like a normal street corner in Tokyo and went around the corner to the actual scramble. In Japan, a street crossing where pedestrians can walk across the intersection in any direction is called a scramble. As far as I can tell, this scramble is famous because there are a lot of people here, and the people are here because it is famous.

The scramble, however, was not what most intrigued me. The area around the scramble, the actual Square, the stations, and the structures around the Square are what intrigued me. This is an area where the maps are both horizontal and vertical. The area around the Square is packed because it has six subways and a railroad that come into and through a series of interconnected stations. It is one of the busiest places on earth. More than 1,000,000 people pass through these stations every day.

There are large buildings on both sides of a major street with two pedestrian bridges connecting them, and down below, way below, at ground level, is a creek in a concrete channel.