Walking across Japan, part 1: From Tokyo to Takasaki

Eighty miles trekked across the length of greater metro Tokyo

My five day eighty mile walk, from the center of Tokyo to its furthest suburbs, has been a series of minor disappointments that’s threatening to turn into a major disappointment.

It’s not that people haven’t been nice to me, or that I’ve had a particularly bad time, it’s that Tokyo is not a place I could imagine living, something I had long hoped to do someday. Which, again, has nothing to do with the people or the culture, but rather with Japan’s built environment, which for a lack of a better word, is oppressive.

Not from a “your individual rights are under threat from above” way, but from the sense of being trapped in a massive sprawling shrink-a-dink mall, where everything is both too ordered and yet somehow also too cluttered. Where every space is a tad too tight and every streetscape a tad too congested. Where no matter what direction you go, it’s a slight variation of the same boxy hard surfaced backdrop. Where after a few days, if you’re unlucky enough to notice it, then unlucky enough to start obsessing about it, you begin to feel surrounded and start desperately looking around for a soft curved surface, or a plush couch, or a large open and unused space. Get me out of this sterile unbroken Lego world of flat gray brick buildings, brutalist towers, and a sky jammed with utility poles and electric lines, and lead me into something a little softer, a little roomier, where I can be alone, even for only a few minutes, just me, my thoughts, and and maybe some trees.