shine

Tokyo has many characters: the capital city of Japan, it is more than a place for government offices or emperor`s palaces; it is more than a centre of business and commerce; it is more, even, than a home for the twelve million people who call it such. It is a place where people can experiment with life. For some it is a playground, the birthplace of cultures and fashions that are unexplainable to those that do not occupy the same niche from where they came. Tokyo is a place where you can be who you want to be but most people are not; it has the most accepting of populations where a passion for politics, a pop group, a robot or a sexual fantasy is indulged, catered for and allowed to follow its desires to often extreme ends.
Bursting with modernity it is also a city whose rustic, rural soul is never that far from the surface: beneath the skyscrapers there are often fields of rice; among the glittering halls of consumerism, a shrine to a fox god; a whiff of superstition and a sadness.
Because despite the lights and glow of glass fronted towers and success all is not happy here: Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and Tokyo, by population density alone, takes the lion`s share of problems. The working hours and conditions are cruel; the escapes for the belittled workers, toxic and dangerous. There are shadows at the edges of the great bright world all believe in and wish for and even the most hopeful of residents can see them everyday as they reach out for the beauties that shine they become aware they are alone and the hand that should touch theirs in the darkness never stays.

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