Change-Change-Change

  I've been into photography since I was s small child and so recording images via film, tape, IC chip, and whatever comes next, is of perpetual interest to me.  But what has come to occupy a larger percentage of my time than recording new images, is the analog video material I recorded from early 1990 through to mid-1993 - from reviewing, editing, posting, and responding to comments from viewers, to thinking about the nature of change....

  To a certain extent, change is something I tend to think about anyway, but I've noticed that the number one aspect to the 1990-93 videos that generates pretty radically different responses is change, specifically whether things have, or have not changed in the past 28 years or so.  I think 28 years is an interesting amount of time - almost exactly one generation.  Without actually researching it, I think 28 must not be far off the mark for the average age people had children in 1991, and now some of those children are having children themselves....

  I would like to write about this in an orderly and logical way, but as I finished the above paragraph, I realized there were several aspects to the concept suddenly competing for attention.  I stopped writing for a couple of minutes and stared at the picture above (of 1991 Hibarigaoka)... finally reaching the conclusion that it's impossible to do this in a really orderly way and/or I don't have time to do it that way, so I'll just run through some things in the order they reach my typing fingertips, and not worry about what really deserves to come first.
  So - the picture above of 1991 Hibarigaoka Station - is of the station before it was completely rebuilt.  I think this is something any sane person would agree has changed... which brings up a strange sub-category to this concept.  For some videos, which depict a place that has changed quite radically, some biped or other out there will respond "Nothing has changed!".  I suppose that when someone declares that something that has very clearly changed, has not changed, they are trying to provoke an argument, or maybe they are mentally deranged?  Who knows!
  But there are many places where, depending on what you were expecting from the number "1991", things are either surprisingly the same, or surprisingly different.  Add in the many detailed elements that make up reality and time that are not clearly visible in a recorded image, and there are things that are quite different on a kind of radio frequency level and thus not evident to all.
  And... stepping way way waaaaaaaay back, there are elements to a society/culture that are remarkably resistant to change.  When I read "The Journal Of Francis Hall, 1859-1866", I was struck by several cultural elements that he described that left me thinking "Well, that's the same as now!".  Initially, when reading an account of things from about 150 years before, you expect any and everything to be different, but on a cultural level, much of a culture carries forward at least partly (or perhaps mainly) due to the power of language and how a culture is enshrined in its vocabulary, sentence structures, etc., and how they are used.

  Video as time machine.  I used to joke to a programmer friend when I saw them, "So, have you invented a time machine yet?" which they would laughingly wave off and laugh at, but one day, when I asked my tiresome question, "Have you invented a time machine yet?  I want a time machine!" they didn't laugh, and instead looked off thoughtfully into the distance and said something along the lines of "It would require an immense amount of data storage..." which surprised me, but then I started thinking about it, and the concept of a time machine consisting of detailed recordings of the past started to seem like something other than a joke.  There are many aspects to this concept, but here's one experience I had that really did feel like a time machine experience:

  I was talking with a group of people in a conference room and I was using a large screen TV as a monitor for writing notes (to give to the group) when someone mentioned how they were going to a party.  I asked where, and they described renting an apartment someone set up specifically for people to rent to give parties at, and I responded "Oh, I went to a party at such a place back in the Bubble Era, in 1990... and then realized I could actually take them there.  I typed in the relevant search terms on the computer and suddenly the June 1990 party was in full swing on the large screen TV, with stereo sound no less.  With the large screen and the quality sound, it really felt like we had jumped back in time, and - in a way - we had.  A couple of decades later, we were (again for me, first time for the others) experiencing a 1990 Bubble Era party....

  And so, when someone recently commented on YouTube how one of the 1991 videos made the viewer feel as though it was a kind of time machine, I responded with this:
  "Thank you for commenting!  I'm finding them to feel that way for me too, probably even more so, since I was behind the camera at the time.  On some level, I knew some of the things I took would only be viewable via a recording in the future, but I think what really drove me at the time was that I found Japan to be an intensely interesting place and thought that there was too much focus on places like Kyoto and on anything deemed new and/or strange, so I strongly felt the normal things in the city (Tokyo mostly) needed to be recorded.  It took a couple of decades for technology to advance to the point where I had a platform to show people.  The main downside to this is that so much of my material is copied and used without my permission...."

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
tokyoht.blogspot.jp/