Humans & Machines

Having some things on my mind in the middle of the night, I tried watching a movie, but it didn't have enough distractive power to take my mind off of things, so it seemed like a good time to finally go over some text I wrote a couple of months ago... edit it and post it.  (Note: The photos were taken within about a month of when the text was written, but are random.)

(20221027) Riding on a train yesterday, as I listened to the robot voice (recording) overly-loudly broadcasting the exact same computer program generated message I've been listening to over-and-over-and-over the past (how many?) years, I thought back to how much nicer it was when a human being was making the announcements - a fellow human being making the same journey as the passengers.  And while the driver of the train is operating a push-pull control for accelerating and braking, there's a computer between their actions and power or brakes applied.  That element is less clearly defined than the robot vs. human announcements, but it was another element of a fellow human being on the journey down the rails.  Now, even though there's a human at the front of the train at the controls, there isn't really a sense - as there used to be - of a person running the train.

(20221027)  Shibuya at 6:15 a.m.  Small crowds of young people clearly on their way home after being up all night.  Either young people now are fairly radically different from the young people I walked among a few decades ago and/or I've changed to the extent that young people appear more different than they actually are.  So?  ........  Nothing.  Just that observation.  I used to feel like I was within my generation while in Shibuya, now I sometimes feel like I've entered a strange foreign country when there.

(20221027)  It would be nice to go back in time and give myself a 2022 laptop and 2022 camera to record the eighties with.  I actually did a fair amount of writing back then, but it was handwritten... so it would all need to be transcribed first to do anything with it.  Also, I would have written a whole lot more if I'd had a laptop computer back then.  At least I had the foresight to learn to type back when I thought I would only really be using that skill with typewriters.  It amazes me how many people are six-finger typists.  Percentage-wise, it doesn't seem all that many people have actually learned how to touch-type.

(20221227)  Reading my text from October 27th, it reminds me - once again - how important it is to record things in words at least now and then.

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

Hoping for things not to get worse...

   I used to think - when people said how they wished they lived in a different era - that every era has its good and bad aspects... but recently it's beginning to seep in that whereas the thought before was "how to make things better", now it's beginning to be "how not to let things get worse"....  Which is pretty profoundly depressing, when you think about it.

   That said, I must say I do appreciate the computer tools we have now.  It was so much more trouble to write before.

   Shorter and shorter days... the morning begins under a starry sky - more the night before than morning.  And then as the commute progresses, the light of the sun begins to color the eastern sky.

   I noticed a couple of (probably) tourists looking at a station map this morning - with a woman touching the stations on a line one by one while the man she was with looked on.  Not sure what she was doing, but as it was a Japanese only map, it occurred to me that she was counting off the stations to somewhere?  I briefly considered stopping and asking if they wanted any help, but even before the Internet foreign tourists were generally vastly happier to get lost than to be helped by another outsider.  That used to seem odd, or perverse, or something to me, but it makes sense - you don't go off to exotic lands just to talk to people like you left at home.

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

No Place Like Home?

   Pre-forevermore-pandemic days, a lot of people would do things after work and often keep an eye on the clock so as to not miss the last train(s) homeward-bound.  These days, there seems to be a race for home - with people eager to escape being outside and go to the one place in the world where they can relax - at home.  The evening rush for home seems to start from about 15:00 - suggesting that a lot of people are starting work at around 07:00.  Looking at the nearly packed very-early morning trains, certainly a lot of people are going to work early.

  I understand the feeling of just wanting to get home soon only too well.  While I still enjoy doing things after work such as visiting art galleries, there are many days when I could do something, and think about it, but then figure I'd rather just rush home as soon as possible - where I can relax.  Fun as it may be in the thick of city action, there is a stress and worry about being out.  I suppose a lot of people feel the same way?

  But is it all about the forevermore pandemic?  It also seems to me that as one interesting element after another disappears from the city, replaced by wonderful new things - and I don't even mean that in sarcasm, the new things are nice... - the city is becoming a boring place to be out and about in?  And then there's age - many of the things that seem boring to me now are probably interesting to the current crowd of young people?  There's bound to be some of that, but I really do think the city is becoming a less interesting place to walk around in.

-LHS

幸せと辛い

 幸せは幸せを感じる為, コントラストの辛い気持ちが必要かも... それが分かるにしても, 辛い時は面白くない... です。 その間は平凡の事はあるが、平凡もある意味辛いので, 仕方がない - 人生は面白い事ばっかりは不可能？ - LHS

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/

2000年5月12日 蒲田駅前 商店街とスーパー

サンロード KAMATA 商店街 - I went by here earlier this year and while the shotengai is still there, the atmosphere seemed a bit less energetic?  The effects of on-line shopping presumably.

I had always enjoyed walking through this covered shopping arcade - and occasionally buying things.  On my last visit the whole area seemed a bit... lonely?

2000年 / 平成十二年

Looking at this view of a grocery store in 2000... it got me to thinking.  How much are grocery stores today basically the same as they were twenty-two years ago?

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

20220829 0300 (2000年/平成十二年)

(220829)  Writing is kind of an unpredictable thing.  At the moment it's nearing 3:00 a.m. and I can't sleep, so I've decided to post some pictures from the year 2000 along with some text.  Not sure how this is going to turn out... you never really know what you're going to write until you get going and then the words either come or they don't (simplification, but close).

Looking out the front of a train is quite a different feeling from looking out the front windshield of a car.  In the train, the tracks are there leading the train, so there's a relaxed feeling of zooming into a kind of planned future.  In a car, there can be (depending on the road and the traffic) an adventurous feeling of being able to go anywhere, but also a slight sense of potential danger since the car's trajectory is in the hands of the driver (yourself or someone else).

2000年/平成十二年

2000年/平成十二年

(220915)  This picture (below).  At the time, it was still a new thing for there to be retail shops inside of stations.  Back in the mid 1980's, most stations only had the newspaper stands with printed publications and some other odds and ends for sale, and I remember I found Shinagawa Station intriguing since it had restaurants inside the station, which was unusual at the time.  Now, stations are less stations than shopping malls built over train tracks - retail first and foremost with the trains seemingly of secondary importance?

2000年/平成十二年

I like these older type train cars more than modern train cars for a number of reasons - the vents in the ceiling that could let in outside air via the roof vents, the completely open-able windows, and the general lack of plastic.  And then there is some hard-to-define aspect... that makes them seem more friendly and sturdier?

The briefcase!  I just realized when looking at this photo from 2000 that I don't recall seeing them lately... have they stopped carrying this type of case?

2000年/平成十二年

There's more stuff packed into stations now, so they have lost the big open space feeling may of them used to have.

2000年/平成十二年

What is different between places and times?  Things that look the same can be quite different and things that look completely different can be remarkably the same.

The special no-contact zone that a train in motion was before is quite different now.  There are good and bad aspects to being in a no-contact zone in motion, but this photo of the inside of a Keihin-Tohoku Line train reminds me of the good aspects.....

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

令和四年八月から平成十二年五月の事を思い出す

After I had burned out my video cameras taking the 1990-93 material, I went back to regular film photography for a while and then - after my Nikon FM2 was stolen (and I couldn't afford to buy a proper replacement) I recorded things with words-only for a few years and then - in 2000 - got my first digital camera (with which I took the pictures in this post).

After not having taken any pictures for a few years, it was pure pleasure to be taking pictures again in the spring of 2000, and while film photography taught me to carefully compose pictures and think hard about how I wanted to compose them, I really appreciated being free of film and its need for development!

To this day, I'm glad I learned photography with a fully manual single-lens-reflex film camera, but have very little desire to go back to film now.  True, the feeling of the camera and the experience of carefully taking one picture at a time I would like to revisit, but then to do anything with that, the film would then need to be developed and scanned, etc., so... banzai digital photography!

In one way or another I've been asked several times how/why I choose to record a certain scene.  I've flippantly responded to that before by saying that I just like taking pictures, and enjoy taking pictures of whatever is around me, but - obviously - it's not that simple.

There are a whole range of reasons for taking pictures - from just wanting to experiment with what's at hand to see if an interesting element of it can be captured, to wanting to record the atmosphere of the area, to trying to record some of the essence of an era... etc. etc.

Technology and equipment... I was super-excited in 1990 to suddenly have a machine that recorded 30 frames per second simultaneously with sound!  The early material was quite rough, as I had never used a movie camera before... and by the time I was getting used to taking video, I had burned out four expensive machines and had to stop taking video for a while (post bubble era with my lower paying post-bubble era income).

And in 2000, I was - in a way - even more excited by the digital still camera I began using.  The problem with the video cameras is I was constantly thinking how best to use them, and since they were fairly fragile, I had to constantly take them in for repairs.  And then there was editing, etc.  Contrast all that with my first digital camera, and I was having all the fun of my film photography days with non of the difficulties, new medium learning phase, and frustrations I had experienced with video.

Naturally, the video material is more valuable now, but - at the time (in the year 2000) - I was having more frustration-free fun taking still digital pictures of that spring (all of the pictures on this page were taken on May 11th, 2000).

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

At what point...? / To what extent...?

Revisiting 1991 again today, I looked at the shotengai street near the north exit of Hibarigaoka Station and realized that the 2022 version has changed quite a lot compared to the 1991 version.  Change to places generally happens incrementally, with each change being of varying degrees.  [Video] 

As a starting point, imagine a single independently owned and operated shop and what changes it might undergo over time:

- Different owners.  The shop may look exactly the same, but with different people running it, that's a notable change for the people who shop there.  For people just passing by, they would probably have no idea that something is different.

- The same owners, but a change in what's for sale.  Again, this is a notable change for people shopping there, but - depending on how visible the change in merchandise is - people walking by might have no idea that anything has changed.  Or, if the type of merchandise looks radically different, someone looking in the window may think how times have changed... but have they?  With the same owners, and if the merchandise has somewhat similar uses as the previously sold merchandise, it could be that there is very little substantive change and it's just a visual shift, etc.

- The building is torn down and rebuilt.  This will likely be a very large visual change (although I've seen some buildings torn down and the newly constructed ones don't actually look at that much different than what they replaced).  Once the shop is open again in the new building, have the owners and/or the merchandise changed?

- Everything is the same - the same owners, the same merchandise, the same building.  But after several decades, young customers are people who hadn't been born yet when the shop opened.  With many changes in customers and in the surrounding area, the shop has become something different by way of contrast - an element with a different meaning than it used to have.

I could go on further with more examples of different types of changes that could affect one shop and how people perceive it, but presumably that's enough to illustrate my point - that there is always change - of one kind or another, perceived or not perceived.  Which is why I usually end up being irritated by people who watch a video showing part of Tokyo and comment that "nothing has changed" (全然変わってない), which is simply not possible for any area of Tokyo over three decades!

As an exaggerated statement, I suppose you can say that, but that comment  全然変わってない is sometimes made on a video that has countless very obvious changes.  Different buildings, different cars, different hair styles, different clothes, etc. etc. and then I invariably think whoever made the comment is disconnected from reality, or unable to perceive their world in any detail... 現実ハズレ？

Anyway, there is always change - of one kind or another!  The better you know a place, the more you will perceive changes to it over time.

Oh... the title "At what point...? / To what extent...?".  I made half of that title before I began writing this - thinking "At what point is it proper to say that a place has completely changed?" and - looking over what I've written above, I suppose "To what extent can a place actually stay the same?" might be better?.....

Change... it's a fascinating thing - and impossible to precisely pin down, but generally interesting to think about.  - Lyle H Saxon

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