Tokyo 2017

We went to Tokyo for the holidays to avoid the Christmas crush of traffic and mall crowds. Sure, Christmas is a thing in Japan, but it's somehow more subdued. The workweek goes on as usual. The lights are bright but the colors are understated. Christmas here is more like Valentine's Day there - a big date night but none of the enforced merriment for Children and family. There's also this weird thing about KFC - but that's just one of those Japan things. 

Tokyo was an opportunity to act within a different context, to determine what survives outside our normal background. 

In many ways, cities are meta-organisms, the exoskeleton complex societies develop to protect their ways of living. That's the baseline, but divergent historical experiences mean some cities have evolved other functions. Tokyo is a place to get things done. It is the sea of black cloaks where everyone moves so fast. Tokyo is a place to get distracted, with its museums and its shops. It is there to instruct on the outer limits of reason and modernity. 

Manila, on the other hand, looks like a gray tumor from the sky and up close. It is always rising, always growing with gleaming new condos and office buildings. But its feet has always been in the shadows and the sewage. Never forget that it is a place to test you, and every so often, kill you. It is there to remind you that the beast is still within.