I don’t have a lot of coherent stuff I want to talk about at length lately, so I am just collecting my thoughts and presenting them with some pretty pictures I have taken while out and about over the last few weeks.
Designers and engineers
I studied product design for a short, abortive while as a second degree. It wasn’t that I was failing or struggling in any way academically; actually my professors suggested I drop out and pursue a masters instead. I simply ran out of money. (As an aside, being broke? Fantastic way to get shredded. Forced dieting baybee.) But even for that short time I was enrolled, I learned a lot of new concepts and language to describe what we were doing and why we did it. The important part here is that I want to talk of design not in the narrow sense of making things that look pretty, but in the broader sense of thinking about the purpose and the end users of whatever object or system one is cooking up in their sketchbook.
Fantastic. Understood. Now why does this matter? When something bothers me, I think through it relentlessly. I can’t stop ruminating! And that which has been bothering me in recent months is the quality of urban life in Tokyo. Especially when I compare it to life in Europe. Why does day to day life in Oslo feel so considered and thought through? Why does Tokyo feel like an idiot mess of wires and steel? This is where my brainwave strikes. Who has more priority in society; designers or engineers? Of course, in reality engineers rule everything, but we’re talking on relative terms here.
To me, Japan is totally run by engineers, whereas in much of Europe, designers have a stronger voice. What do engineers do? They optimise to constraints. In Japan these constraints are cost and reliability most of the time. The pros? Well, infrastructure that is built quickly, reliably and at relatively good value (though increasingly the good value part of the deal is not the case…) The cons? Pretty much everything ends up being a convoluted mess, from the ubiquitous plastic kitchens and bathrooms, to buying train tickets to the hideous bundles of wires decked all over the streets (unless there’s a cost incentive in constructing things that are pretty and readable. i.e: hello, Mori Group.) These idiot savant engineers never stopped to consider if their perfectly cheap and reliable projects would even be usable! A quick contrast to Oslo, where you have designers heavily involved in large civil projects. Existing there, in spaces built with the humans who use them in mind, is a joy. On the flip side, it is expensive and slow to get anything done in Norway. Well, the Oljefondet should help with meeting the costs at least.
My conclusion? More designers involved more often in Japan please. Or at least keep the gibbering numbers-men on a leash where they’re limited in their ability to cook up incomprehensible contraptions and gizmos.
Stress and homeliness
I have been traveling a lot this summer. Some for leisure, some for work. In general, I like to travel in the summer. I run, flee, escape, scuttle away from the abhorrent torture months the Japanese call summer. Atsui ne. Normally I cluster all my work and leisure travel into the three months where conditions are at their worst. This year it has been a little different. Maybe I’m beginning to slow down, maybe the cooler (for us) El Nino summer has killed off a bit of my desire to escape, but I have found myself thinking of home a lot more when out and about.
In some ways I have become much more circumspect about my life here. I had a funny sense of deja-vu a couple of weeks ago, walking around London with two friends who also live in Tokyo. They were pointing at things like usable bike lanes, bins, historic architecture and a generally chaotic populace, exclaiming “Tokyo could never!” at all of it. I agreed. I did that myself! Recently, however, I feel that has tempered a bit. I get a lot out of living here. A job where I don’t want to kill myself every Sunday evening is probably the number one bonus here (big ups to My Job: I am grateful), but I also see the safety, scenery and ridiculously affordable cost of living as major pluses here. I also love my apartment very much. I’ll attach various artsy photos I have taken of it below.
Dad always tells me that traveling is fun, but living out of a suitcase has its limits. I think I get it now, but maybe in the opposite. I don’t care if I live out of a suitcase, but the traveling with my shitty worthless yen bank balance, the ‘have they lost my bags again’ fear at the airport luggage carousel, and the stress of hopping shores for work and trying to be as productive as possible to make sure it all seems worth it in the end; these things grind me down. I think of my apartment with its gigantic stupid (beautiful) orb lamp, my struggling Japanese Maple and wonderful morning light and start to feel homesick.
Life cycles
Everyone is having kids. Shock! I was at their weddings two to three years ago.
Yearning
Got back into listening to sad music again recently. Naturally, it leaves you feeling a certain way. I think many people have written about this, and I doubt I am more interesting than they are when it comes to getting my thoughts down but, whatever. It’s my blog and I’ll fill it with as much boring dross as I like.
The broader background is, I guess, my deletion of Spotify and several other hell-apps mid last year. It’s the whole reason I started writing this blog. Several friends wanted to stay in touch and hear what was going on. I went to the effort of writing all of this and never sharing it with them. Lol. Back on track; after removing one small limb of the algorithmic demon from my slab of despair (read: phone), I knew I had my old music collection around on a hard drive somewhere. It would be really easy to bring all that back into the light again.
So, with the light of awareness beaming the shit out of it, I start to listen through my old music again. A lot of it is very of its time. I was a very active participant in a couple of music forums in the early 2010s. Much of it ties into a very specific flavour of teenage angst I felt. Namely, a desire to be anywhere else. I’d spend hours listening to this stuff, staring at the ceiling and imagining different futures or dream-like impossibilities and completely detaching from the existence I was living. Far from miserable, but hardly joyous either.
Hello from four weeks in the future. I left this blog entry for a while. Anyway, I was listening a lot to Greet Death. They’re really really good. Also really miserable. Excellent! Do give them a spin.
