Streetnotes

Tokyo is a boundless synthesis of many cities and villages. In this and in many other respects, Tokyo is a celebration of motion. And with motion comes rapid change. Today, the metropolis thrives on this almost ritualistic phenomenon of destruction and rebuilding. This is a city of no beginning and no end, where stories are spliced together and juxtaposed, sometimes in harmony, but more frequently in chaos. How can one possibly begin to conceive of urban space in the midst of all this apparent confusion? How can one claim to hold memories of Tokyo when the locus and language by which they are painted are in perpetual flux? The question must involve a rigorous redefinition of Western notions of space and its representation. Ever so slowly, amidst the clutter emerges an immutable harmony that, like almost everything about Tokyo, spurns words for the silences in between—a naked urban haiku that washes transparent dreams over this jungle of concrete, this tangle of time. Space seems to merge with its representations, buildings shed their facades and forms jut into a skyline of multifarious screens and resplendent banners. And so we ask, how does Tokyo rewrite our memories? What is the nature of memory in a city that so swiftly assimilates into its mutable aesthetic all inscriptions of the previous, the already, the long ago?