Magic Twilight Ride

(Evening Bus - Twilight Ride) Mid-October - Rolling down the road with the windows open.  The realization that the pleasantly cool temperatures will soon become uncomfortably cold is what gives an evening like this its electric charge of magic.  It's been a day of unexpected pleasure.  Meeting a pleasant group of artists and discussing their cheerful art, seeing other exhibitions, talking with other people - meeting a new gallery owner who I've met several times before as an artist when they had exhibitions in the same space they are now in charge of.....

   I guess today is probably a good way to head into many days... just heading into things to see what's going to happen with senses alert but not expecting things either good or bad?  Not sure that makes sense or that's right, but that's how it seemed today.     - Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/

Keyboards for Touch-Typing...

Typing on a computer - my first laptop computer was an old used IBM PS/55 with (by today's standards) ridiculously low power.  I don't even know what the rating for the CPU was, but the HDD was 40MB (yes, MB, not GB or TB) and came with 2MB (again, that really is MB, not GB) of RAM which had been upgraded to the machine's maximum of 6MB.  I only used it for text (naturally - I don't think it was capable of anything else) and it worked well for me for a while.  One thing about it was much better than new computers though - its keyboard.  It had a keyboard with really good touch that was quite nice to type on.  The short-throw, light touch keyboards on modern laptops can be nice to use when you get used to them, but for serious touch-typing with low errors, that old PS/55 keyboard worked much better.  With super-light-touch keys, you have to (more than with longer-throw keys) monitor what you're doing.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon

www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/

Pleasant Bus Ride / Lighting

(Evening)  Red taillights of the many cars ahead - rain on the windshield wiped off from time to time with the windshield wipers.  The progress is slow, but so long as the atmosphere inside the bus is okay/good and the people you're traveling with are agreeable, there's something enjoyable about road travel that is different from traveling on the rails.  Pausing to wonder what exactly are the differences, one thing that glaringly stands out is the lack of over-lighting on the bus.  The trains have about 20X more light than they need, so if you're not worried about looking weird, they're generally more comfortable to travel in wearing sunglasses... which perhaps should be renamed over-lighting-glasses?

   (Morning)  Looking at what I wrote yesterday - of course it depends on where you're sitting in a bus!  I was at the front last night and so - naturally - there were no bright lights at the front as they would reflect off of the windscreen and interfere with the driver's vision.  At the back however is a different story!  As I write this, there is a slightly irritatingly bright bank of LED lights overhead - not as vastly over-bright as the massively over-bright lights on most trains now, but still.  I suppose overly bright lights are a kind of anti-crime measure?  I'm sure there are good reasons for them, but they are unpleasant for me nonetheless.

   (Later the same morning)  Now on a train... with exceptionally bright lighting.  It doesn't seem to bother anyone to any obvious degree... but for me at least, train journeys would be more pleasant with about half as much light.   Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon - www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ - youtube.com/lylehsaxon - lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/ - lookback1997.blogspot.jp/

Smirking Tourists

    It's easy to spot the latest invasion of tourists - they're the smirking people walking around with either no masks at all or masks worn as necklaces (to stop germs from entering their throats via the skin of the neck [sarcasm]).  To be honest, I have come to hate tourists.  They buy cheap tickets to an aircraft that flies them into another culture where they walk around getting in the way - with those idiotic smirking faces, and generally act like they're at an amusement park.  It's an infuriating thing to see these out-of-their-element idiots walking around projecting "ignorance is bliss" while they disrupt the cultures they don't belong in.

   Probably making airfare five times (maybe ten times) more expensive would filter out much of the smirking riff-raff and get society back to only having to put up with clueless outsiders who really want to (and are willing to pay for) temporary access to another culture.

   I think viewing clueless neanderthal smirking tourists as easy money is a big mistake.  .......  I was about to explain why, but I think any thinking person can work out for themselves why importing disrespectful smirking idiots into a culture (even temporarily) isn't a great thing.

 - LHS

Perceiving Change (1980s-1990-2003-2000-2022)

After receiving a comment on one of my YT videos from the 1990-93 period stating that the viewer had resided in Japan for a decade starting in 2003, and thought that - by-and-large - there wasn't much difference between what they had perceived while here and what they saw in the 1990 video.  I responded to that with (slightly edited):    (Note: LHS Photos from 2000) 

   One of the things that's kind of amazed me with the material I recorded in the early 1990s is how it's perceived.  One one hand, some comments say "nothing has changed" and others say "everything has changed".  Naturally it's also location specific.  One example of something that pretty radically changed but doesn't stand out is Ebisu Station in 1990 - the Yamanote Line trains in use were two generations of carriage older and Ebisu Station consisted of a single platform (Yamanote Line only) sitting out in the open air (with a simple platform roof, but no building built over it).

   Another detail is that some buildings that are demolished are replaced with remarkably similar-looking buildings, so at first glace nothing has changed, but whole buildings have been demolished and new ones built in their place.  So I guess you could say the change is in the details.  When looking at all the details, this is basically a different country than it was back then... and simultaneously the same culturally, although things are shifting in that area too.

The person who made the original comment responded to my comment saying that they were focusing on the "feel and look of the people and the city in general" and not on "specific infrastructure that has changed or no longer exists".

I thought about that and another element of the endless comments about whether things have changed or not changed led me to reply with this (slightly edited):

   Thanks for continuing the discussion.  Just yesterday I was talking with an Australian who has been here for a couple of years and had a friend visit from Australia last week.  Apparently the friend was very wide-eyed and amazed by things here - taking pictures of everything, etc.  That and your comment reminded me of an element I wasn't thinking enough of - contrast.

   The contrast between past and present noticed from the standpoint of being in one place and noting detail changes that add up over the years; and the contrast noticed from the perspective of radically different cultures.  When I read the journal of a man who was here from 1859-1866, I was surprised at how familiar many of his interactions with people sounded, and I suppose that's basically the enduring culture of the land.  So certainly the basic look and feel of the land persists.  One tiny example of something different that might not be noticed:

   In the eighties, it was just a normal thing to hang the bedding out on polls or balcony railings in the morning to air it out, and then whack it with a... not stick exactly, but a tool made for the purpose of knocking dust off.  Then there was a very widely covered court case in the news regarding a woman whose neighbors had complained about the noise, and she had responded by hitting her bedding harder and longer and chanting for them to move away.  Eventually the noise-making futon woman was jailed and virtually overnight people stopped hitting their futons to knock the dust off... and in conjunction with that basically also stopped putting the bedding out on the balcony railings.

   To me, that's a fairly significant change, but isn't a big thing when comparing the vastly larger difference between cultures.  In connection with that of course is also the move away from tatami mats and futons to beds, but the cessation of putting the bedding out in the sun preceded the nearly universal move away from futons.

And then there's the issue of how observant people are.  I just read an article about how a man noticed that the wrong category license plate was on a Nissan Skyline GT-R in a parking lot.  Realizing something was a amiss, he reported it to the police, they investigated it, discovered it was a stolen car and then arrested two men who came back for it in the parking lot.

I read that and thought: "Now there's an observant person!  I bet they wouldn't watch one of my videos from 1990 and declare that nothing has changed!"

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

2000年の新橋 - Shinbashi (with an "n")

Shinbashi is one of the areas of Tokyo that I often went to in the 1980's, starting in 1984.  At the time, JNR (国鉄) spelled it "Shinbashi" and while I think "し" should be written "shi" and not "si", I disagree with writing "ん" as "m"... ever.  "ん" is "n" - period.  I strongly think that writing it as "m" is a mistake.  I wouldn't bother to explain this, but from time-to-time people assume I'm misspelling 新橋 when I write it as "Shinbashi".  No, no mistake.  Shinbashi is the correct way to spell it.  Of the various forms of romanization for Japanese, Hepburn romanization is probably best, but writing "ん" as "m" is an error.

As you can see from these photos, Shinbashi had a stronger architectural connection with the past in 2000 than it does today (2022 as I write this).  If I had had a camera in 1984, the trains would have been solid green for the Yamanote Line and solid blue for the Keihin-Tohoku Line.

Today some people are horrified by the concept of there being no platform walls (no, it's not a "screen"), but that's just the way all the stations were before.

The fountain in the SL Plaza in front of Shinbashi Station.  A really strange thing about it is how for many people (myself included) it disappeared without its disappearance being immediately noticed.  On one visit to Shinbashi I suddenly realized it was gone.  So I asked around and most of the people I talked to had basically the same reaction.  They knew it was gone, but had no idea when it had disappeared.

Below is a fairly rare example of a building that goes back several decades but is still in use and (as far as I know) isn't planned for demolition anytime soon.

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