七国への旅 - 令和二年三月

The new morning ritual now after a night's sleep is to go on-line and see how much worse everything is.  I don't recall any time in my life where reality seemed so much like a disaster movie where the people on the screen confront an ever worse reality - leading to...?

Aside from the abstract feeling of reading about bad news from afar, and seeing/feeling the people around you getting nervous about events, the first in-my-face shock came on February 27th at Tokyo Station when I went to the platform for the Chuo Line and it was nearly empty!  Then when I got on the train, it was nearly empty as well - until it filled up down the line.  Thinking about it now, I suppose the businesses in the Marunouchi area (next to Tokyo Station) were told to work from home?

Gradually, the concept that it's bad to be near people has set in and I've stopped (for now...) going to art exhibitions in Ginza and stopped walking through places with a lot of people (if I don't need to be there that is).  What with telecommunications, it's not so bad to hole up at home, but after a while you want to get out and get some fresh air....

And so I decided to take a mini-vacation to a suburb of Tokyo I'd never been to before.  As I exited the station, I felt a little excited and started thinking about it:  "On the face of it, I've just gone across town to a nondescript suburb, but what is so different really from jetting to another country for a vacation?  In both cases, I'm in an area for the first time, seeing things I've never seen before.  This is a valid vacation!"  Granted, I could use the same language I use at home, half of the chain store names I already knew, and I would be going - not to a hotel - but home that evening, but on the adventurous vacation side, I hadn't seen the names of half of the chain stores, and as I walked up a hill I'd never walked up before, I thought "I wonder what's up the road here...?"

I don't know...  As I attempt to explain it in words, it looks kind of mundane on the screen... but in the moment it was actually quite nice.  After not having gone anywhere new for so long, the change really did feel as though I were on a journey into an unknown land... which I was.  The part that looks mundane is that it was just another part of the city I already live in and was just a day trip.  I know... but trust me, it felt like an adventure!

As I walked up the hill, I thought, "As long as this goes up, it's going somewhere interesting... if it levels off or starts going down, I'll turn around and go back."  Writing/remembering that, I realize an important element of it becoming a pleasant adventure was that I had low expectations for it.  I didn't really expect to find anything very interesting, but whatever was up the hill was guaranteed to be at least a little bit interesting, since I was approaching it from a fairly long period of boredom.   Contrast is the key element here.  If there is contrast, then it's interesting.

Midway up the hill I looked across the street and saw an area between condominium... not high rises, but medium rises?  From about nine to fifteen stories high?  What do you call those?  Anyway, they're one of the forms vertical gated communities take.  The area looked visually interesting, so I thought it would be a good place to record a pair of JV/EV videos.  So I crossed the street and started a JV video... and realized it was a boring one and there wasn't so much to say, so I just left the camera running and said the same boring content in English, then another comment in Japanese and then English again.  Ideally, those should be separate, but lumping them together in a JEV video gets it out-of-the-way more quickly.

From there I continued up the hill... and at an intersection, I looked down the road going to the right.  Something about what I was looking at seemed interesting....  Recalling the moment now, I'm not really sure exactly why it seemed interesting, but the scene beckoned and I obeyed the allure.  As I walked along, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was approaching the edge of a valley, with a view through space to the other side of the valley.

Again, contrast.  If you do a comparative analysis of valleys on planet earth, surely there are many more dramatic and beautiful ones.  But for me, after spending months on narrow streets, in crowded trains, inside buildings, etc., that open space - with some flowering trees (cherry? plum?) in the middle of a cluster of green trees (on the other side of the valley) was a beautiful sight.  Arriving at the end of the road, I then descended a series of stairs (with the camera rolling) and discovered Opera Tunnel... which I just had to give a try.  (The experience and the video were in tandem, so that's an authentic view.)

The echo was... dare I say spectacular?  ("Spectacular" here refers to the quality of the echo, not the quality of my bad singing.)  As a child, I liked the fun of making noise in tunnels, continuing on to honking my car horn in them (when there was no other traffic) and throughout my life, I generally haven't been able to resist trying out the echo in tunnels.  But... I am usually disappointed!  There's always some kind of echo in a tunnel, but generally not enough to be much fun.  Opera Tunnel though, now that's what a tunnel echo should be!  Perhaps the oval shape of the tunnel works better than a round tunnel?

After that, I climbed back up the stairs and walked along a beautifully straight road on the edge of the valley.  Why "beautifully straight"?  Back to contrast - when living in cities that had nearly all straight roads, I would have considered it the very definition of boring, but now I live in an area with no straight roads at all.  There are some roads that are straight for short stretches, but even those roads tend to be curving slightly or straight for only very short stretches.  So, looking down a perfectly straight road, it was an exciting thing to walk down - for the contrast of it.

And... that's about it actually.  As I walked back down the hill towards the station I was beginning to feel tired and then the prospect of being home again that evening was a pleasant thought.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
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