When I first came to live in Tokyo, the abundance of neon felt surreal. These days though, it's the city's lack of visual over-stimulation that seems unreal. Before the earthquake it was hard to even picture Tokyo without its neon lights. But here we are.
Kabukicho:
Shibuya Crossing:
Ginza:
While much has been said about the government-imposed rolling blackouts (which I have yet to experience), I think it's striking that the vast majority of these blackouts are voluntary. For the most part in central Tokyo, there is power. People are just not using it.
Everyone is doing his or her part to conserve electricity for the north. Shop owners, almost universally, are choosing to turn off their neon signs. The stores are open for those who enter, but their normally blinding lights out on the streets are nearly invisible now. Residential apartments are dark inside. Many citizens have told me that they are starting to go to bed early and wake up with the sun, in order to save the energy that lights up their homes at night.
My husband and I try to keep the lights low, especially since the lamp by our window is very visible on the street at night, and we do not want the only lit window in the entire apartment to be ours.
The darkness of the capital feels incredibly appropriate somehow. Every partially lit shop I pass, is like a flag flown at half mast. Every unlit window is a constant reminder that so many, so close to us, are going through such unimaginable suffering. With so much empathy everywhere I look, it becomes impossible to forget a what I saw in the news today.
At the graduation ceremony for a junior high school in Miyagi, a father attends in place of his son who was washed away in the tsunami. The man holds up a photograph of the boy in a baseball uniform as the accepts his son's diploma.
Moving through the train stations, the signs, billboards, clocks and vending machines that I had always presumed to be constructed of naturally glowing material, have all gone dark and are hardly visible.
In Iwate, the results of the high school entrance exam- taken before the earthquake- are posted today. A solemn-faced boy in his school uniform tells a reporter that he really wants to go tell his mother that he passed the test. But she is still missing.
There are over 10,000 stories like these, and likely just as many darkened shops in the capital. So perhaps it's my survivor's guilt talking, but personally, I am in no hurry to see the neon begin burning again.
I no longer want to take my own life for granted in the same way I had failed to appreciate many of my city's modern conveniences.
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