latlong - dawn

Dawn comes quickly in these latitudes. The black crows who live high on the shining hi-rises start their laughing caws, and, as if a signal or some language has passed between the natural world and the man made,the trafficstarts again. By seven the vast expressways, stacked up in threes and fours and snaking through thecity, are crawling with cars, lorries, chromed trucks, vans, taxis and busses. <Tokyo> has a traffic thrombosis, a transit embolism. Its arteries are clogged. It could be Tokyo's on the verge of a first: a city paralysed by a stroke. Butwhat a city. Tokyoites have fetishised building because they build things so well, so fast. Their skill has made Tokyo a super-salamander of a city, growing a new leg or tail whenever a limb atrophies or dies. They can knock down and remake within <two> months here, and I'm not talking about a paper house somewhere in the outskirts. I mean big shining white buildings with no sharp corners; <jet black> sinuous sculptures that balance mass and void; forms that dance in light; a glass wing upended and <sixty> storeys high. God, they can build, the Japanese, they can really build. Taken as a whole, the city in all its huge reality, its chaos, its speed and its slowness, is not a thing of reason or order. The bus rumbles on nose to tail with yellow <taxi>s and shiny cars. Tokyo is bricollage on a grand scale.
Tokyo is an old city, a sea city. People <ghost> along walkways above the roaring roads. Tiny hand made buildings nestle next to black canals. The waterways run under the huge elevated roadways, the concrete piles supporting the traffic stand massive in the black, still <water>. The elevated roadways course through the canyons formed by the big buildings: the sky shows brilliant blue in between. The buildings are separated by tiny gaps just big enough for a man to stand sideways. People and traffic combine to make an urban <dementia>. Earthquakes mean the buildings can't stand cheek by jowl. Amid this brutal and chaotic urbanism thin cherry trees are dressed in paper blossom, fluttering in the hot wind of a billion air conditioning units. All this scrolls past the windows, an unknowing, unfolding urban pageant. The bus rocks to a stop on soft springs, its airbrakes make a sound like <whalesong>. I alight near the hotel and walk the last two hundred metres with my rolling case chunking across the gaps between the paving stones. As I walk a group of identically dressed teenage girls wash round me carrying paper lanterns and banners and wearing cowboy hats. They are singing and clapping, blowing whistles in a festival of their own making. They pass by, happy in their day. I breathe in deep. The place <smell>s different to anywhere else. Food scents and coffee saturate the moist air. The traffic booms overhead. Crows laugh all the time. Girls totter on the highest of heels talking into tiny luminescent mobile phones. Men wear grey suits, white shirts and dark ties. Tokyo throbs with morning life. At night it's a different place. It's not only the city, its scale and its extent: it's the detail. Whoever it was thought that tall buildings should have flashing lights, I take my hat off to him (or her, of course). But Tokyo, oh, Tokyo, you don't have plain flashing lights, do you? You have ruby red pulsing lights that come on and fade off with a slow determination, with a majesty, a calmness, an ebb and a flow that is entirely appropriate to the scale of the place. Every building has them, and each has its own rhythm, they gleam atop the buildings for as far as the eye can see. Stacks oflights, buzzing with electrostatic energy dissipated through slowly pulsing devil-<red> beacons. The city is a playground of giants. The buildings are entities. I am mesmerised.