We took the Shinkansen from Kyoto back to Tokyo and it’s fast, it’s OMG fast. The line going the opposite direction passes you on rails six feet away and so quickly, just a rush of air, one heartbeat and gone, a quarter-mile of train snapping away like a rubber band. It’s basically impossible to take a picture of it, but if you like I can show you my white blur collection.

I’m used to traveling on ViaRail in Canada, and the Tokyo/Kyoto Shinkansen trip was a bit of a long slow shock. Both cities are huge, Tokyo in particular is vast and high-density and the rail line runs mostly parallel to the coast, so instead of spending your time looking out the window at hours of forests and farmland there’s only about twenty minutes on the three hour trip that don’t feel like you’re rocketing through the middle of a city, scattered around in two-minute chunks. On the trip out from Tokyo, I just kept staring out the window at the passing buildings thinking, Jeebus, does this place ever end?

I’ve never seen a city like Tokyo before, and it’s hard to believe that it can exist at all as it is. 12 million people or so and it’s clean enough that you could eat off the roads, none of which are in straight lines and many of which don’t even have names or even unique identifiers. But every morning it seemed like a brand new metropolis had been cut out of its shrinkwrap and carefully placed around us, pristine and barely used; I felt like I’d have to be a powerful man with powerful enemies and a shadowy past just to be able to find somebody willing to put gum on a sidewalk.

The thing that kept reinforcing this impression was that a lot of the time Tokyo is quiet, eerily quiet. Step off a main road into any of the narrow, labyrinthine little streets that make up much of the city and you might as well have stepped onto the moon; the background hum you can hear in every city I’ve ever known is gone, baffled right down by the tall buildings and enthusiastically non-Roman road plan. So, is this when the ninjas jump out, I kept thinking? I can’t hear my theme music, so if they jump me now, I might not win.

Sadly I didn’t see any ninjas, but I suppose if I had they’d be sad ninjas indeed. Akihabara was enough of a letdown, I didn’t need to get randomly jumped by a bunch of second-rate martial artists. Next time, I’ll have to pack one of these, which I wouldn’t have thought would ever work, but now it’s hard to believe that it wouldn’t. I don’t think that I was more than twenty meters from a vending machine the entire trip.

But when we did find ourselves on a major road, near a train station or somewhere like Ginza or Harajuku, we’d find ourselves in the middle of a huge, noisy, frothing, enthusiastic mess of people, and walking through it felt like I was crowd surfing in the world’s most polite riot.

Harajuku was particularly awesome, some of the finest people-watching in the world. It’s a young person’s ‘hood, for sure, and the kids were dressed up and out to see and be seen, but the cosplayers were the real gold. There were weekend Elvises (one of whom had procured an enormous pink ‘57 Cadillac from somewhere, a monster about six times the size of a typical Japanese car), crunchy-looking Goth girls, elaborately coiffed Harajuku Maids, cosplayers and vending machines that served iced coffee and beer. For a few moments, I wondered why I should ever be anywhere else.

There was even what looked like an impromptu battle-of-the-bands going on, though whoever won that, it was a pyrrhic victory for sure. From what I could make out, there was some boy-band signing session going on nearby, so the cosplayers were out in force, hundreds where there would “normally” only be dozens. It hit me there that all fashion is a strict subset of cosplay, and that the people who embrace that will be able to push at boundaries the rest of us can’t even see, and make the world a lot more colorful, interesting and fun for all of us.

And it also occurred to me, as I was crossing a bridge beer in hand and patient wife in tow to take some pictures of a horde of girls in goth-lolita outfits that life had somehow brought me to a point that I was in Japan with a beer in my hand and my wife humoring me as I went to take some pictures of a horde of girls in goth-lolita outfits, and I just started laughing, because it’s good to be me.

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We’re home. No disrespect to our gracious hosts but two weeks away is slightly more than plenty, it turns out.

I’m well behind on my blogging, of course, and have to sort through several thousand pictures to figure out which ones are worthwhile, but the last few days in Japan and a week in Hong Kong are on the way.

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Context, because it is all about context.

First, a bit of short reading: The Grim Meathook Future, a phrase coined by Joshua Ellis.

The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.

Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Second, a well-worn observation, that a common failing of science fiction is to assume that the future looks pretty much like the present, only more so; the first time I remember noticing that was in Larry Niven’s mid-seventies Gil Hamilton series, set centuries in the future, where a planet of thirty billion people is described as largely peaceful and well-regulated, but computers still output their information on paper tape and a few hours of “time on the computer”, singular, is described as an absurdly exorbitant expense.

Those stories don’t age well, as you might imagine; nothing is as hard on science fiction as the future,

Bear with me, here.

Akihabara, or “Akihabara Electric Town”, is Tokyo’s discount-tech district and something of a nerd Mecca. It’s home to a ridiculous number of computer and anime stores, and many shiny technologies are found there; the widgets of the future are reportedly sold there long before finding their way to the Americas, I made my pilgrimage, hoping to get a glimpse what the future would look like.

And I was deeply disappointed. Whatever you might think about what’s coming, it’s crystal clear that the future we go with had better not look like the one I found at Akihabara.

The Japanese do not, I think, have a long cultural tradition of making new stuff. They do have a long tradition of taking ideas and items from elsewhere and making or doing them about as well as they can be made or done, and in Akihabara that particular cultural bent has been focused on nominally inexpensive technology. And everything you could ask for in that was there - racked-up rows of tiny devices, bigger stores holding smaller, more luminous widgets than I’d seen anywhere, lightweight laptops, tiny media players, wildly functional cellphones, you name it. Collector’s boutiques for all things anime, comprehensively stocked to obsessive completion, second-hand electronics stores stocked to the ceiling with retro cool.

Tiny LCDs reflecting off brushed aluminum casings and grim portent as far as the eye can see.

If I were a younger man I might have seen it differently but what I saw, all I could see, was the science fiction of the-present-only-more-so, a huge amount of obsessive effort put to the service of a future that will not age well at all. Mountains of plastic crap, robot figurines, big-eyed-cartoon-schoolgirl porn and thousands of people expending enormous amounts of time, money, talent and effort in a thousand desperate bids to be not bored. And I don’t think it’s going to age well at all. I sure hope it doesn’t.

And to nobody’s surprise but mine I’m sure, when presented with the nonrational customer, the rational merchant’s prices don’t toddle downward, no sir. For an ostensibly-discount tech district Akihabara is goddamned expensive, and only got more expensive the more gimmicky stuff became. I’m sorry, you want a hundred and thirty bucks for a one-gig flash drive shaped like a piece of sushi? I’m thinking no. Specifically, I’m thinking no and fuck off. Which brings us to the compare-and-contrast part of today’s entry: Tsukiji

We didn’t get to Tsukiji in time for the morning tuna auctions, so when we got there it the day’s catch was being piled into trucks and sent wherever it goes. The public accessway to watch this process looked terrifyingly-enough like an industrial service entrance that we mistakenly thought it couldn’t possibly be the regular public entrance, so instead we went around the corner to what turned out to be the actual service entrance to try our “luck” there.

I don’t know if that was a mistake per se, but since we were walking around with a four-year-old girl and a nine-month old boy, it certainly was exciting. I wouldn’t really describe the place as child safe, even though they made it out OK, and their mother earned my respect one more time for not flipping out even a little when she clearly (and entirely justifiably, I might add) felt that flipping out was exactly what the situation called for.

Because Tsukiji is, by an order of magnitude or three, the largest fish market and distribution facility in the world. In addition to the several hundred tons of boring old produce that moves around Tsukiji every day, they shift more than two thousand tons of fish in and out of a single building every day in a convulsive spasm of unhinged expiry-date carno-mercantilism, with all the slippery floors, sharp edges and fast-moving machinery it implies.

And it’s beautiful. The seafood is all vivid colours and shimmering rich texture, alien shapes and odd appendages packed in ice next to huge marbled slabs of tuna. The machinery is corroded and worn, heavy chains greased thick, the air is full of the thump and clank of shifting metal, two stroke engines, the smooth whine of bandsaws and aging brakes.

Try and imagine that the people from Finding Nemo and Blade Runner decided one sunny morning to collaborate on an elaborate, big-budget snuff film. God, it was beautiful. Oh voice-in-my-head, I love you so; don’t ever change, you embittered, psychotic junkie fuck.

Unlike what I saw at Akihabara, everything I saw at Tsukiji was motion-to-purpose, the blade put to meat meant to feed somebody, not some shiny thing meant to distract. If you only saw pictures of the place you might think the opposite, could easily believe that that Akihabara is the way to go. But you need to see them in person to really feel it, I think; you need to feel the fishmarket rattle and froth around you, to soak in Akihabara’s curious sterility. Nobody at Tsukiji had that terrified otaku inability to look you in the eye or time to wander around slowly deciding what model to buy. The three-foot gaff and four-foot gutting blade in the fishmonger’s stall will never sit idly in a display case, and I saw way more glassy eyes in the store aisles in Electric City than I did packed in ice in the fish market.

While there’s no jihadis or redneck motherfuckers there to throw that occasional horror into the works, at least there’s also not the profound sense that you’re looking at an evolutionary dead end, some cut off island where the animals grow more and more elaborate plumage in response to the lack of real competition. And whatever the future looks like, if all we can muster in response to prospect of the grim meathook future is an exaggerated version of the present, with all that effort put to novelty and trivia, then that will be an enormous failure.

There might be some way to beat that, if we can figure out how to put all that effort towards something meaningful, whatever that turns out to be. But in the meantime, I guess I’d better go learn how to gut a fish.

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… and the only prescription is more temple. Apropos of nothing, I was a little surprised by how much Japanese produce I recognized strictly from Mario powerups, though I couldn’t find a place that served a decent radish, mushroom and fire-flower salad.

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You’ll be getting more in this vein for the next few days; Kyoto is to beautiful centuries-old Buddhist temples as Seattle is to Starbucks. They’re everywhere.

Apparently it is considered to be in extremely poor taste to photograph graves and gravestones. I’m not sure why, but I put forward the argument that since cameras steal a bit of your soul, taking pictures of a soul’s final resting place amounts to spiritual shoplifting. My friends seemed to think that was the dumbest thing I’ve said in some time.

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I am only just now restored to connectivity, which means that I will be playing catchup for the next two weeks and for which I humbly apologize. I am in Hong Kong right now; I’ve finally found a good SD/USB widget, so this borrowed PC that I’m working on will now deign to let me back up my photos, an enormous relief to me. My home machine is for some reason inaccessible, a cause of some distress, but I now have backup space available to me, for which I am grateful.

Remember, kids: If you don’t have your data twice, you don’t have it at all.

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, a morning in Kyoto:

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I was in Tsukiji and Akihabara yesterday, and I found the future. One possible future, at any rate. I didn’t find it where I expected to, so I’m going to let it rattle around in my head for a few days before I tell you about it.

I’m typing this on the Shinkansen, the bullet train, on the way to Kyoto and Nara. We just passed the Pokari Sweat factory, and whenever I see that name, I imagine a room full of knockoff pokemon shackled to treadmills, tubes leading from the bags strapped under their citrusy armpits into a huge, vaguely stalinist bottling machine. There are fields, Neo. Endless fields.

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On my first morning here, I rummaged through my luggage and discovered two things:

• A note saying our luggage had been searched by the Department of Homeland Security, and
• No socks.

One of two things may have happened here. The first is mere absentmindedness and coincidence, and the second is that the American national security establishment has stolen my socks.

I’ll let you guess which way I’m going to  tell that story. Fortunately my underwear was not deemed to be a threat, and none of you will be subjected to a rant about Hoye stomping Tokyo commando-style. That doesn’t mean I’ll spare you the mental image, of course, because that’s how I roll. Don’t worry, ma’am, I’m from the internets.

It occurs to me that perhaps my socks were not confiscated, but commandeered, playing some shadowy but crucial role in the war on terror that the world can never be allowed to know.

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