What it means to Breathe

I have come to a conclusion:
Where I am currently living is "quaint", where I go to school -breathes-.

I make no effort to hide the fact that I consider myself a country boy.  When I was born I lived on a dairy farm.  When I was 6 my best friends were Amish and my favorite pass-time was running around barefoot.  For the rest of my pre-college years I lived in a place where I could hide in the woods for days and the biggest city had a population of 22,000.  I'm pretty sure here, in metropolitan Tokyo, 22,000 people can live within a square block.

Now it isn't that I need green fields or vast wildernesses to feel comfortable, nor that I feel the life of a bustling big city is for pigeons and "them thar city-folk".  After living in a small city like Battle Creek I can recognize that there are perks to it all, and there always will exist a happy medium to find yourself in no matter who you are.  Case in point, here in Tokyo it is really nice to simply walk to anywhere you need to go.  I mean it.  You can go anywhere by foot if have about 500yen ($5) in you pocket.  And you see everyone doing it, it's soothing in a way.  The only thing that's really setting that apart is "everyone" at any one moment in time could be from 100 to 1,000 people at every street corner.

The thing I really want to impart is the scope of it all.  Seeing countless thousands of people every day is one thing.  I mean, the population of the Tokyo Metropolitan area is in upwards of 35 Million, "seeing a lot of people" everyday is a given.  But to understand that fact, to truly put the idea in your head and let your brain comprehend it.  To comprehend that it would take 1590 copies of your home town to fit in this place.  I stand with more people on my morning train than I did at my High School graduation.

I have often heard the metaphor of large cities being alive.  Not as a comment on how busy it is but all of the actions that take place in it make it as if it is a living entity.  Its' peoples movements, its' purchasing power, its' diet, its' refuse, its' blood, and of course its' breath.

"Big cities don't just exist, they breathe."

That's all good and well as an analogy.  I can understand that before seeing one, I can put a colorful face on the scale of things.  It all makes sense when you think about the actions involved, the motions of they day within the thing. 

It's one thing to say that a city can breathe.  It is another thing entirly to feel its' breath down your neck.  To feel it heave with the simple, regular, and autonomous actions of daily life and understand what it is that exactly means.


Where I am living is a city by anyone's definition of the word.  A large population in an close urbanized development.  But the truth of the mater is Saitama is merely a suburb.  It is the minivan filled and quaint green lawn equivalent of the cheap carbon copy prefabricated neighborhoods of the US.  It has all it needs; it has its' own jobs for folks who live here, schools and hospitals, its' own little mini-economy.  But for the most part it exists to service the population that every morning and night ships in and out from Tokyo down the Tobu-Toji train line.

That train line ends at Ikebukuro Station, which itself is linked into countless other train lines including the main Tokyo Japanese Railway loop.  Ikebukuro is a Crossroads.  One that is quickly growing.  I'd guess that no building that has been built there in the last 15 years was done so under the scale of seven stories.  It is filled with all manner of shops from books to restaurants (specializing in Ramen, woot) to even an up and coming shopping district.  And that is where I go to school.  Rikkyo University is a cluster of 100 year old Western and Asian mixed style buildings "tucked away" in the district.

To me Ikebukuro is full.  No, no, it was full a long time ago.  It now exists in a perpetual state of filled and getting stuffed bigger.  And this district, is just one of them.  There is a high rise bookstore in Ikebukuro, and on the top floor there is one section of windows that faces to the south east and the rest of Tokyo proper.  I went there today to take a photo for you of it, but the weather decided not to participate.  It liked the concept of buildings that disappear both beyond, bellow, and above as far as the eye could see (which was only a visability of 1 km, and the glare from the window made a bad photo).   However, when I first arrived at this view it was when the scope of it all first tried to slap me upside the back of the head.

From this view the city doesn't stop.  There is no city center with clustered high rises.  It is all high rises.  You know that somewhere below all this concrete was once a rolling geography, which has since given way to this new artificial one.  The varying roofs of buildings rolling over one another as far as the eye can carry you.  It doesn't exist as a sprawling patch of clustered humans.  It exists as its' own artificial entity beyond the mind's eye.  You try to put together that these are places where people live, work, and play.  Where people are.  But there is so much.  You try to tell yourself that this is what living in a city of 35,000,000 people means but your brain, in an effort to keep you sane, chokes down the thought.  The only thing I think that prepared me for this in the least was staring up at the impossibly clear night skies in northern Michigan and knowing that there was more up there than I could comprehend.  The only difference in this in-graspable scape is that when you look out over it you are half expecting to see it move as it takes a metaphysical breath.

Will I one day understand the scope?  Perhaps.  Will I one day be able to truly impart what it means to see something like this to another?  Probably not.  It isn't rare for me, especially while studying a foreign tongue, to find myself at a loss for the right words.  And in this world of mysteries that we live in I would be bored if sometimes I didn't find myself without comprehension of some things.  But to be like this, without frame or scope on such a scale...  This is new.  This is what people talk about, and for good reason.  And this... is just what I can see from it from where I am going to school.

Well, I can feel the city breathe.  But I suspect it will be some time until I can catch my breath long enough so that I can breathe in time with it.