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/
1 comment:
Hello,
I wanted to leave a comment right after you posted your article last year, but I forgot and I did not find the time and the energy to do it again. What you are describing is really interesting and made me think a lot. I just wanted to react on one thing so I hope I won’t be too long.
Are those pictures around Kashiwa station? It’s really quite a coincidence for me that you talk about perceiving change with pictures of this station: I lived in Japan from 2019 to 2022 in Matsudo (I assume you should know the city) and I used to pass by Kashiwa Station almost every day to get to the campus further north before our Japanese “lockdown”. I immediately recognized the surroundings of the station: I first though it was a common Tokyo’s suburb train station area but the elevated platform, the escalator, the alleys where taxis are waiting, the west bus terminal with the Tobu bus and its easy-to-see colours… I was sure at 100% it was Kashiwa station (it's not stated anywhere along the post isn't it?) and I could not believe it when I saw the caption “Photos from 2000”. This would be an easy statement to say “nothing has changed” but on closer inspection I can’t remember this floral pathway above the bus terminal on the second picture, and I can’t find the sign indicating the Chinese language school I used to see when taking the escalator to the station. Well, I have nothing more to say, just wanted to share this regarding the perception of change.
Best regards
Ps: sorry for my English, I am a non-native speaker.
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