japan trip
For Christmas and New Years, I went with Japan with my wife Z, my mom, my older sister, her boyfriend B, and my younger sister.
Daily Log
Saturday 12/21/2024 / Sunday 12/22/2024 – Tokyo
- Z & I flew @ 12:45pm directly from Vancouver (YVR) -> Tokyo (NRT)
- train to hotel, snacks from 7 Eleven, rest, and wait for the others to arrive
- Z slept while we ate at a nearby izakaya (drinks, raw tuna, cheese pancakes, potato croquettes, chicken karaage, etc.)
- chocolate ice cream bar at 7 Eleven on the way back to the hotel
Z & I flew with Air Canada. We upgraded to Premium Economy to avoid being stuck in a couple of middle seats. It was expensive, but it made our flight much better. I spent the whole flight reading and writing. I read the first 150 pages of Normal People and
wrote about ithow normal people think
In her novel Normal People, Sally Rooney exposes the hidden reasoning of our subconscious. She does so primarily by translating into clear words the opaque subconscious reasoning of both her protagonists, Connell and Marianne. If they were real people, these characters would experience their thoughts not as Rooney’s sentences but as intuitive feelings and inarticulate notions. But we as readers get privileged access to their thoughts and feelings through the backdoor entrance of Rooney’s prose. This special access has two major effects. One, we understand these characters intimately. In a way perhaps that they would not understand themselves. And two, we are reminded that we also experience internally an unending stream of unrefined thought. We too are partially in the dark about our intentions and motivations. That this level of semiconscious thought exists and that our understanding of it can be sharpened through introspection and articulation are useful observations Rooney offers us.
Another way that Rooney puts unconscious reasoning on display in her book is by having her characters make choices that seem unmotivated or arbitrary, but prove meaningful in effect. Following are two examples of this, one minor and one major.
A minor example is when Connell and his mother Lorraine give Marianne a ride home from the grocery store. Connell chooses to drop his mother off first. Is it a coincidence that this gives him some private time with Marianne? Lorraine begins collecting the groceries to take them inside, but Connell stops her and says he will do it later. This seems at first an odd detail for the author to include. But its purpose becomes clear when Connell declines Marianne’s invitation to come in for tea. Oh, I would, but there’s ice cream in the boot. Rooney is showing us that this was a calculated decision. Connell contrived the situation to contain a convenient excuse. What isn’t clear is whether Connell is fully conscious of his calculations. It seems like the kind of decision he might recognize only in retrospect as deliberate. And until he does, until he admits to himself that only some of his decisions are made in full consciousness, he cannot be fully selfaware.
A similar but more major example is Marianne’s choice to tell Connell that her new boyfriend Jamie is a sadist. On the surface, this is a bizarre choice. Why confess this, unprompted, to an ex-boyfriend? Is she being cruel, trying to make Connell jealous? When Connell reacts with alarm, Marianne plays it off with a “cute little smile.” Nonchalantly, she continues. [He] likes to beat me up. Just during sex, that is. Not during arguments. Marianne’s behavior seems odd and clumnsy, but it’s not. She has invited Connell for coffee to tell him – the same person to whom she confided about being physically abused by her father – that her new boyfriend beats her up during sex. She is crying for help. Or at least for some sort of attention. But is she doing this with awareness? Is her casual tone a mask to hide her feelings from Connell? Or is she concealing them from herself as well? Her amusement is likely a real feeling encasing the truer feelings of desperation and selfloathing. This enigmatic form of communication reflects the contradiction inside Marianne. She cannot yet confront the dire state of her selfesteem but she also cannot ignore it. To appease both of these great psychic forces, her subconscious has crafted an encrypted message that Marianne can deliver unconsciously and that Connell can hopefully decipher and heed. The message is Help. Help me recognize the abuse I’ve endured as abuse and as the true source of the bad feelings I have for myself.
Marianne cannot take the first step towards rehabilitating her selfesteem alone. She needs a witness who will point at her abuse and call it such. On some level, she knows she is a victim of abuse, but how can she trust herself if her own mother gaslights her about it? It would take immense selfbelief to assert without anybody’s support that all her family members are traitorous liars that arbitrarily treat her like garbage. How can she muster the strength to believe this when her experience in school seemed to confirm that she is indeed worthy of blind spite and scorn? This is why Marianne needs Connell to say Your family treats you horribly and it’s not your fault that they do. Recognizing the abuse as abuse is the first step towards believing that she is not bad. Marianne cannot even begin the lengthy process of unlearning her feeling of worthlessness until she recognizes that I am inherently bad is a lie she tells herself to understand the abuse she endures as something other than abuse. Until then, this lie keeps Marianne sane. It gives a semblance of coherence to the paradox she cannot unwind. Why does my family treat me so badly if they love me?
Marianne’s choice of subjecting herself to the clutches of a sadist is an example of what psychotherapists call “acting out” feelings. It’s a puzzling concept that I find compelling. Marianne has an unconscious need to process the awful trauma her family has inflicted on her, but she cannot find the psychological and emotional safety to do so consciously. This tension finds release in her “acting out” her feelings by humiliating and degrading herself. Marianne cannot yet identify her lack of selfesteem as caused by the cruelty and violence inflicted arbitarily on her by her family. Instead, she locates the problem inside herself. She figures there is a fundamental “coldness” that belongs to her and for which she is ultimately responsible.
Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of… I have a coldness about me. I’m difficult to like.
To reflect this belief, Marianne routinely attaches to people that will make her feel bad about herself. Jamie her sadistic boyfriend is not the first. Nor is her toxic friend Peggy. Before these was Connell.
Marianne’s relationship with Connell was founded on the basis that he is superior and that Marianne should content herself with his private attention even as he pretends not to know her in public. Indeed, part of his magnetism is that he simultaneously affirms and dismisses Marianne’s feeling of inadequacy. He gives and withdraws affection cyclically, allowing her to experience both assurance that she is lovable and confirmation that she is not. All this is in the subtext until Marianne spells it out to him over coffee:
I didn’t need to play any games with you. It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to.
Marianne punctuates this point by asking:
Who wouldn’t want to beat me up?
And here we turn to Connell’s side of the equation, first by noticing that his response to this rhetorical question fails to reassure Marianne that she does not deserve to be beaten up.
I wouldn’t. Maybe I’m kind of unfashionable in that way.
Connell says he wouldn’t beat her up because he’s not into that sort of thing. Significantly, he does not reject her statements of selfloathing. Would it be too far to say he is agreeing with her by omission? That his lack of response functions as a veiled agreement?
Time and time again Connell has chosen not to address Marianne’s feelings of inadequacy. Despite how humiliating Marianne’s position was in their secret relationship, Connell kept her there. Again and again he chose not to rectify this disrespect. And when circumstances threatened to reveal the truth, he betrayed and abandoned her. And perhaps this choice genuinely sprang wholly from cowardice, from fear of public rebuke for dating Marianne. But is there some part of Connell that enjoyed dominating Marianne? There are certainly signs after they rekindle their romance in university. For example, in response to sexual flattery from her, he laughes in delight and says:
Marianne, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.
Not God made us for each other. No, God made you for me. Awareness and desire for his superiority lives somewhere in Connell’s consciousness. There is a moment when it bubbles up into his conscious mind and it frightens him. When Marianne says she wouldn’t enjoy a threesome but would do it if Connell so desired, Connell becomes suddenly aware:
She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.
Where is this intrusive thought intruding from? Is it a coincidence that this occurs to Connell, considering that repeatedly throughout their relationship he has failed to uplift her and thus, by omission, pushed her down?
Sally Rooney gives us many hints that there is an unhealthiness in the couple’s dynamic. For example, when Connell apologizes to Marianne for degrading her in high school, he adds that it “wouldn’t have mattered” if people had found out about their relationship because, it turns out, it wouldn’t have harmed his reputation anyway. This struck me as an insensitive and insolent comment. Connell should be apologizing that he didn’t have the courage to make their relationship public even if it would have made people think differently about him. He should be apologizing for making Marianne pay in humiliation for his gross lack of integrity. Marianne again fails to stand up for herself and instead of demanding that Connell recognize more fully what he did, she says I didn’t tell anyone, I swear to god.
Normal People implores us to examine the invisible reasoning behind our decision making. If we tune in and listen to our silent thoughts, what might we hear? What might we learn by noticing who we bring into our lives and what treatment we encourage and accept from them?
We like to think that who we are is up to us, but we already exist by the time we get around to the task of defining ourselves. The primary task is to listen. Who do we want to be? Who are we? Both are answered from within.
, pausing only to eat meals. I couldn’t believe it when it was announced that we were beginning our descent.
Monday 12/23/2024 – Tokyo
- coffee nearby while Z & my family ate breakfast at the hotel
- together took train to Shibuya City, then ate at a really good conveyor belt sushi restaurant
- solo flat white @ The Roastery by Nozy Coffee on Cat Street
- browse MoMA Design Store & other boutiques, bought tea towel from Hay
- solo walk thru Shibuya, fatigued from jetlag, got another coffee
- browsed robe store but did not find what I wanted
- with group again, bought hoodie @ Carhartt Work In Progress store
- bought shoes and slides @ Hoka store
- visit Tadao Ando’s public bathroom in Jingū-dōri Park, which was featured in the movie Perfect Days
- Shibuya crossing! then very spicy ramen at a place with weird vibes
- taxi back to hotel
I had severe allergies until the early evening. This happens to me whenever I travel somewhere new. In 2017 I went to Europe for the first time and I spent the first full day sneezing and oozing. Same thing this time in Tokyo for the first 24 hours. Reactine didn’t seem to make a difference, just had to wait it out.
Tuesday 12/24/2024 – Tokyo
- arrived at Disney Sea @ 12pm
- rode on lots of rides, walked a lot, listened to Disney Xmas carollers
- subpar pizza & pasta in Little Venice
- explored the rest of the park, rode on more rides, fought jetlag
- left @ 9pm, closing time
The architecture and spatial planning of the theme park was really impressive. It seemed like every corner we rounded we encountered another stridebreaking view of the park.
Wednesday 12/25/2024 – Tokyo
- we started the day slowly to recover
- I went on a couple of solo walks through the Shimbashi area to get coffee
- Z and I walked to Shimbashi station and took the train to Ebisu
- still struggling with jetlag
- we explored Ebisu on foot, stopping at a puppy store and a pharmacy
- we ventured to a quiet alley and up four floors to a cocktail bar called bar EAS MOR
- visited mall briefly, then walked to Toki Taruza for dinner with my mom, sisters, and B
- took train back to Shimbashi, then stopped at 7 Eleven for snacks on the way to the hotel
Thursday 12/26/2024 – Tokyo -> Takayama
- get two flat whites from INCredible Coffee
- took bullet train @ 1pm from Tokyo to Nagoya, then transferred to train to Takayama
- check into hotel and walk into town for dinner at a nice sushi restaurant
- return to hotel and I fell asleep before 9pm to finally cure my jetlag
Tokyo station was huge and very busy. It felt like being in a beehive. It took me and Z a while to figure out how to pick up our tickets. One machine gave us an error message but then we tried a machine in a different section and it worked. Then we circled through the masses, trying to figure out which screen listed our train’s platform. When we finally found it, we struggled to pass through the gate. Z put in the two tickets as the ticket machine had instructed but that wasn’t enough. We had a confusing interaction with a worker there, who we finally understood was saying to scan our IC card after inserting the tickets. We made it through and with thirty minutes left until departure time, we lined up to buy food and drinks to take onto the train. It’s good we came an hour early.
Friday 12/27/2024 – Takayama
- while Z had breakfast at the hotel, I walked into town and had coffee @ Brand New Day and then @ Hids’ Cafe
- at Miyagawa Morning Markets we bought a beef bun, a fridge magnet, two pairs of chopsticks, and two ceramic mugs
- pop into a cutlery store and then have lunch & coffee @ Ember coffee in beautiful 150+ yearold house
- walk up hill to Shoren-ji Temple, enjoying the snowy scenery
- back in town, stop at stationery store
- I bought a yukata at a kimono store
- dinner @ ramen restaurant
- incredible cocktails @ Yu
- thirty minutes in a private onsen w/ Z at the hotel
This was one of the best days of the trip.
Saturday 12/28/2024 – Takayama -> Shirakawago -> Kanazawa
- I walked over fresh snow into town for coffee @ Falò Coffee Brewers, then got cash from post office ATM, then coffee @ Ember, before returning to hotel
- got bus tickets and waited in line for twenty minutes or so
- bus went up through the snow into the mountains
- walk into village, found a bathroom
- delicious snacks and drinks from window shop on street
- walk through village, across pedestrian bridge over the river, to the museum, and then back
- coffees & Baum stick
- waited for our bus for two hours past scheduled departure time
- arrive at Kanazawa station, take taxi to hotel
- food & drinks @ Pari King nearby
- Z was tired so we went back to the hotel
- rest with beer & instant ramen in the hotel room
Sunday 12/29/2024 – Kanazawa
- breakfast & coffee at Isotope Coffee, a beautiful space
- Z went back to hotel to rest
- I strolled through town listening to music and taking pictures
- drank coffee and wrote about Normal People
how normal people think
#books #writing #psychology #subconscious #relationships — Mentioned in japan tripIn her novel Normal People, Sally Rooney exposes the hidden reasoning of our subconscious. She does so primarily by translating into clear words the opaque subconscious reasoning of both her protagonists, Connell and Marianne. If they were real people, these characters would experience their thoughts not as Rooney’s sentences but as intuitive feelings and inarticulate notions. But we as readers get privileged access to their thoughts and feelings through the backdoor entrance of Rooney’s prose. This special access has two major effects. One, we understand these characters intimately. In a way perhaps that they would not understand themselves. And two, we are reminded that we also experience internally an unending stream of unrefined thought. We too are partially in the dark about our intentions and motivations. That this level of semiconscious thought exists and that our understanding of it can be sharpened through introspection and articulation are useful observations Rooney offers us.
Another way that Rooney puts unconscious reasoning on display in her book is by having her characters make choices that seem unmotivated or arbitrary, but prove meaningful in effect. Following are two examples of this, one minor and one major.
A minor example is when Connell and his mother Lorraine give Marianne a ride home from the grocery store. Connell chooses to drop his mother off first. Is it a coincidence that this gives him some private time with Marianne? Lorraine begins collecting the groceries to take them inside, but Connell stops her and says he will do it later. This seems at first an odd detail for the author to include. But its purpose becomes clear when Connell declines Marianne’s invitation to come in for tea. Oh, I would, but there’s ice cream in the boot. Rooney is showing us that this was a calculated decision. Connell contrived the situation to contain a convenient excuse. What isn’t clear is whether Connell is fully conscious of his calculations. It seems like the kind of decision he might recognize only in retrospect as deliberate. And until he does, until he admits to himself that only some of his decisions are made in full consciousness, he cannot be fully selfaware.
A similar but more major example is Marianne’s choice to tell Connell that her new boyfriend Jamie is a sadist. On the surface, this is a bizarre choice. Why confess this, unprompted, to an ex-boyfriend? Is she being cruel, trying to make Connell jealous? When Connell reacts with alarm, Marianne plays it off with a “cute little smile.” Nonchalantly, she continues. [He] likes to beat me up. Just during sex, that is. Not during arguments. Marianne’s behavior seems odd and clumnsy, but it’s not. She has invited Connell for coffee to tell him – the same person to whom she confided about being physically abused by her father – that her new boyfriend beats her up during sex. She is crying for help. Or at least for some sort of attention. But is she doing this with awareness? Is her casual tone a mask to hide her feelings from Connell? Or is she concealing them from herself as well? Her amusement is likely a real feeling encasing the truer feelings of desperation and selfloathing. This enigmatic form of communication reflects the contradiction inside Marianne. She cannot yet confront the dire state of her selfesteem but she also cannot ignore it. To appease both of these great psychic forces, her subconscious has crafted an encrypted message that Marianne can deliver unconsciously and that Connell can hopefully decipher and heed. The message is Help. Help me recognize the abuse I’ve endured as abuse and as the true source of the bad feelings I have for myself.
Marianne cannot take the first step towards rehabilitating her selfesteem alone. She needs a witness who will point at her abuse and call it such. On some level, she knows she is a victim of abuse, but how can she trust herself if her own mother gaslights her about it? It would take immense selfbelief to assert without anybody’s support that all her family members are traitorous liars that arbitrarily treat her like garbage. How can she muster the strength to believe this when her experience in school seemed to confirm that she is indeed worthy of blind spite and scorn? This is why Marianne needs Connell to say Your family treats you horribly and it’s not your fault that they do. Recognizing the abuse as abuse is the first step towards believing that she is not bad. Marianne cannot even begin the lengthy process of unlearning her feeling of worthlessness until she recognizes that I am inherently bad is a lie she tells herself to understand the abuse she endures as something other than abuse. Until then, this lie keeps Marianne sane. It gives a semblance of coherence to the paradox she cannot unwind. Why does my family treat me so badly if they love me?
Marianne’s choice of subjecting herself to the clutches of a sadist is an example of what psychotherapists call “acting out” feelings. It’s a puzzling concept that I find compelling. Marianne has an unconscious need to process the awful trauma her family has inflicted on her, but she cannot find the psychological and emotional safety to do so consciously. This tension finds release in her “acting out” her feelings by humiliating and degrading herself. Marianne cannot yet identify her lack of selfesteem as caused by the cruelty and violence inflicted arbitarily on her by her family. Instead, she locates the problem inside herself. She figures there is a fundamental “coldness” that belongs to her and for which she is ultimately responsible.
Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of… I have a coldness about me. I’m difficult to like.
To reflect this belief, Marianne routinely attaches to people that will make her feel bad about herself. Jamie her sadistic boyfriend is not the first. Nor is her toxic friend Peggy. Before these was Connell.
Marianne’s relationship with Connell was founded on the basis that he is superior and that Marianne should content herself with his private attention even as he pretends not to know her in public. Indeed, part of his magnetism is that he simultaneously affirms and dismisses Marianne’s feeling of inadequacy. He gives and withdraws affection cyclically, allowing her to experience both assurance that she is lovable and confirmation that she is not. All this is in the subtext until Marianne spells it out to him over coffee:
I didn’t need to play any games with you. It was real. With Jamie it’s like I’m acting a part, I just pretend to feel that way, like I’m in his power. But with you that really was the dynamic, I actually had those feelings, I would have done anything you wanted me to.
Marianne punctuates this point by asking:
Who wouldn’t want to beat me up?
And here we turn to Connell’s side of the equation, first by noticing that his response to this rhetorical question fails to reassure Marianne that she does not deserve to be beaten up.
I wouldn’t. Maybe I’m kind of unfashionable in that way.
Connell says he wouldn’t beat her up because he’s not into that sort of thing. Significantly, he does not reject her statements of selfloathing. Would it be too far to say he is agreeing with her by omission? That his lack of response functions as a veiled agreement?
Time and time again Connell has chosen not to address Marianne’s feelings of inadequacy. Despite how humiliating Marianne’s position was in their secret relationship, Connell kept her there. Again and again he chose not to rectify this disrespect. And when circumstances threatened to reveal the truth, he betrayed and abandoned her. And perhaps this choice genuinely sprang wholly from cowardice, from fear of public rebuke for dating Marianne. But is there some part of Connell that enjoyed dominating Marianne? There are certainly signs after they rekindle their romance in university. For example, in response to sexual flattery from her, he laughes in delight and says:
Marianne, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.
Not God made us for each other. No, God made you for me. Awareness and desire for his superiority lives somewhere in Connell’s consciousness. There is a moment when it bubbles up into his conscious mind and it frightens him. When Marianne says she wouldn’t enjoy a threesome but would do it if Connell so desired, Connell becomes suddenly aware:
She comes to sit down with him and he touches her cheek. He has a terrible sense all of a sudden that he could hit her face, very hard even, and she would just sit there and let him. The idea frightens him so badly that he pulls his chair back and stands up. His hands are shaking. He doesn’t know why he thought about it. Maybe he wants to do it. But it makes him feel sick.
Where is this intrusive thought intruding from? Is it a coincidence that this occurs to Connell, considering that repeatedly throughout their relationship he has failed to uplift her and thus, by omission, pushed her down?
Sally Rooney gives us many hints that there is an unhealthiness in the couple’s dynamic. For example, when Connell apologizes to Marianne for degrading her in high school, he adds that it “wouldn’t have mattered” if people had found out about their relationship because, it turns out, it wouldn’t have harmed his reputation anyway. This struck me as an insensitive and insolent comment. Connell should be apologizing that he didn’t have the courage to make their relationship public even if it would have made people think differently about him. He should be apologizing for making Marianne pay in humiliation for his gross lack of integrity. Marianne again fails to stand up for herself and instead of demanding that Connell recognize more fully what he did, she says I didn’t tell anyone, I swear to god.
Normal People implores us to examine the invisible reasoning behind our decision making. If we tune in and listen to our silent thoughts, what might we hear? What might we learn by noticing who we bring into our lives and what treatment we encourage and accept from them?
We like to think that who we are is up to us, but we already exist by the time we get around to the task of defining ourselves. The primary task is to listen. Who do we want to be? Who are we? Both are answered from within.
at Townsfolk Coffee
- Z met me and we walked north through Omigi Market for dinner at a fine dining restaurant called Barrier
- we walked through the Higashi Chaya District
- Z went to the Kanzawa Forus mall and I sat at a small pub to read Normal People & drink beer
- I took a bus in Japan for the first time to meet Z at the hotel
- cocktails at Furansu Cocktail Bar, which bartender at Yu in Takayama had recommended
- bites and drinks at Izakaya Hanagumi
- spent the rest of the night at Donuts Music Bar
Monday 12/30/2024 – Kanazawa
- breakfast & coffee at Moron Cafe
- visit beautiful Samurai house with an exquisite garden and a small gallery of artifacts
- coffee @ Townsfolk Coffee, then a brief stop at a combini store
- walk through to Oyama Shrine, through gardens, up to Kanazawa Castle ruins, down past Kenroku-en Garden
- Z took the bus to the Kanzawa Forus mall and I walked through Shiinoki Green Space back to the hotel
- I rested & read Normal People in the room
- met Z for dinner nearby, but Love For All’s kitchen was closed so we went to The Cottage
- stop at Lawson, then back to hotel
Tuesday 12/31/2024 – Kanazawa -> Tokyo
- tax to train station, where we ate and waited for our train
- arrived in Tokyo, train to Shimbashi, checked back into the hotel
- rested a couple hours at the hotel
- dinner @ Daigo, a fancy Buddhist style (?) restaurant
- karaoke @ Big Echo
A thunderstorm began while we were in a taxi on the way to the train station. Flashes of lightning so bright I thought for a moment our driver had run a red light and triggered a super powerful automated stoplight camera. We tried a coffee shop near the train station but it was closed for New Years, which is the biggest national holiday in Japan. Train station was full of stores and flooded with white overhead lighting. Cruel Summer by Taylor Swift playing in the overhead speakers. We sat in Tully’s Coffee lounge with our bags piled around our ankles. On the far wall a horribly sappy and nonsensical marketing poem for & Tea. I felt like I could be in any other manufactured commercial center around the world. Soulless places like these often have this sort interchangeability, lack of identity. Being there, it doesn’t feel like you’re in an actual place. You’re just temporarily detained in a massproduced commercial limbo.
Grateful to be back in the sun.
Wednesday 01/01/2024 – Tokyo
- coffee & breakfast @ Starbucks
- visit fancy mall where teamLABS is
- watched Gladiator II @ 109 Cinemas
- ramen dinner nearby
It was certainly a mistake to visit Japan in the first few days of January. As noted all over the internet, New Years is Japan’s major national holiday and many things close not only on the first but for a week. I’m sure Z would’ve determined this if we had been more involved in planning the trip. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Thursday 01/02/2024 – Tokyo
- visit various neighborhoods including Gaigendaiku(?), ___, Ebisu
- visited two more Tokyo Toilet locations, both in Ebisu
- incredible sushi @ Kaitenzushi Haname Maguro (?) Ginza
- shop @ UNIQLO Flagship store
- cocktails @ La France in Ginza
Friday 01/03/2024 – Tokyo
- visit Tokyo National Museum
- lunch & coffee there
- Hello Kitty special exhibition and gift shop
- visit Senso-ji temple w/ Z
- solo walk in Asakusa area
- dinner w/ my friend H @ ___ then drinks at nearby pub
I had
mixed feelings about the museumwhy context matters
Museums make unreliable experiences for me. The idea of trudging around a vast building looking at a bunch of items seems like lazily assigned homework, especially at big ones like the Tokyo National Museum. I need a lot more context. One paragraph per gallery is not enough, nor is a little tag telling me what each item is or was. Perhaps I need to start booking tours at every museum I go to. I would feel much more engaged if I could ask questions and if I felt like I was understanding something.
At this museum, the exhibit I most enjoyed was the archaelogical one. It sketched the ancient history of Japan in twelves paragraphs posted one at a time in chronologic order around a big room full of ceramic pots and other ancient items that have been uncovered in the region. Most of my attention was absorbed by the information and only a little bit was given to the artifacts themselves. Remains of archaic civilizations are interesting, but they don’t make my imagination run wild. I need something to engage with mentally.
Before we went into the archaelogical exhibit, I spent most of the time on my phone. Not distracting myself, but pouring mental energy into reading people’s opinions on Reddit regarding whether Infinite Jest was worth reading. It was fun. It made me think. I also spent some time grumpily mulling over why I felt disinterested in the museum. Should I find this format engaging? Room after room of items displayed behind glass that I was supposed to examine silently for a few seconds each? And when I was finished, what coherent impression was I supposed to have cobbled from eyeing an assortment of tools and trinkets presented to me with minimal context?
I found myself speculating on the origin of museums themselves. Who made this format up? City planning and land zoning in America, for example, seem arbitrary and incompetently devised until you understand the cultural context they developed from. Certain rules and norms start making a lot more sense when you understand that many American cities followed the example set by New York and that New York’s infrastructure developed to accommodate white families living in the suburbs while working in the city. In that light, we start to see the murky reasons why transit infrastructure in American cities caters to cars first and why single family residential zoning is so common in North America. It is only due to the ongoing housing crises that American and Canadian cities have begun to loosen restrictions to allow buildings with multiple dwellings in these areas.
We must resist the impulse of assuming norms and rules make sense. Things are shaped by their history, and it is the material conditions of a particular place and time that set the mold. When the reasoning underpinning a design is not evident, and when the design seems counterproductive, there is probably a very good historical reason for it. A very good reason for why it happened, that is, not for why it should still be. I suspect there are very good reasons discoverable in the history of museums to explain why they are the way they are. Whatever the reasons, they are not evident to me now, and I suspect they are obsolete. I can imagine European aristocrats centuries ago Oohing and Ahhing at exotic artifacts taken from faraway worlds and imagining the fascinatingly horrid lives those savages lead. Perhaps for these folks simply gazing at objects plucked from the cultures that gave them their meaning was a thrill and a half, and perhaps it would be for me as well if I didn’t have access to computers, the internet, and international travel. But I think even if I lived back then I wouldn’t care much about the object itself. Or perhaps I would covet it as a trophy, a precious symbol of my status in the world. In that case I would make sure to keep it safe, still showing it off, yes, but in the safety of a glass box, alongside the rest of my collection.
. Or, I don’t know, maybe I just needed a meal. Or a better sleep. Or to feel like I chose to go there. Or to have had a period earlier in the day where I’d gotten to direct my attention to things of my choosing. Or a period to produce something, so that I might be in a more
absorptive moodhow to chart moods
Learning to pick between
productive and absorptiveactivities based on my current mood and energy level has helped me notice, for example, when I should try to write instead of reading.
← productive absorptive →
It occurred to me recently that there are many other dimensions to consider when picking an activity. An obvious distinction is active vs passive activities. It is similar to productive vs absorptive, but it’s possible to be absorptive both actively (e.g. reading) and passively (e.g. watching, listening).
← active passive →
Are you in a mood to expend energy or do you need to refuel? The same answer will have different implications for different people. For introverted people, having “expensive” capacity at a given moment offers an opportunity to socialize.
← expensive regenerative →
After determining that you want to watch a movie – a fine choice when one is feeling passive-absorptive-regenerative – you can figure out whether you want to do your passive absorbing alone or with other people.
← individual social →
While going through this exercise, you don’t have to pick a point on each spectrum. I think it’s unlikely you’ll have answers for all. (Ah yes, I’m feeling productive-active-social-regenerative, that’s the word I was looking for!) But with every choice, you filter down many possible activities into the ones best suited to your current mood.
Are you in a social-regenerative mood? Meet with friends to do something that nourishes you. Or are you feeling social-expensive? Do something that you’re not easily motivated to do but that your loved ones want to do with you.
I always try to choose activities based on how I’m feeling so I can evade the taxing experience of forcing myself to do something through willpower alone. But you can’t always wait for the right mood to come. In life, you have to do some planning, and you can do that better if you learn how your moods and energy levels fluctuate.
Notice which activities are expensive for you. Make time after those for your regenerative activites. Whether you’re more introverted or extroverted, take note of how often you need social interaction to keep a healthy balance. Whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, dedicate your expensive mood to
meaningful, important work. If producing is important to you, dedicate time to absorbing as well. As Stephen King writes in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft:
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.
. That certainly makes me feel better about socializing aimlessly in the evening, when I feel like I’ve done something productive with my day.
Saturday 01/04/2024 – Tokyo
- solo coffee & journaling @ City Bakery
- teppanyaki dinner w/ my mom on top floor of mall in Ginza
- visit the teamLAB Borderless Digital Art Museum
The Digital Art Museum was really cool. It was a dark maze on the bottom floor of a fancy mall where myriad projectors shone moving patterns and images of light on walls, floors, and ceilings. This by itself might’ve been a gimmicky socialmedia tourist trap, but embedded throughout the large labyrinthine gallery were rooms where sculptural elements combined with light, music, and mirrors to create surreal experiences.
Sunday 01/05/2024 – Tokyo -> Vancouver
- check out but leave bags at hotel
- solo cortado from Brooklyn Roasters in Ginza
- solo browse flea market & buy orange tinted glass to use for cappuccinos at home
- pick up bags at hotel and take train to Narita
My intention was to browse Hands and Itoya in Ginza, but I came across the flea market when I stopped for coffee by Ginza station. There were dozens of stalls selling ceramics, porcelain, kimonos, jackets, bluedyed fabrics, and so on. The orange tinted glass I bought was only 400 yen, less than three dollars in USD, and I could see it selling for tens times the amount at trendy stores in the USA and Canada. I’m still sour about going to the East Vancouver “Flea Market” to find they charge an admission fee and sell priced up secondhand and vintagestyled clothing.