“We are in the kitchen when the shaking starts. After a few seconds we are unable to stand, and crawl under the table. The shaking grows in magnitude until it feels as though the house is made from latex; warping and stretching side-to-side. I clutch a leg of the table and put my head to the ground (the recommended approach). Hannah, my partner, sits upright watching the shaking; she begins to panic and hyperventilate. I tell her to look at the wall, but she wants to see the shaking.”

Unable to sleep through the aftershocks, I stayed awake and wrote about the quake for TV3 News in New Zealand. You can read the rest of that report HERE.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I wrote an article for a magazine speculating about a catastrophic earthquake in Tokyo. The editor of that magazine called me after the quake hit; we were both a bit unnerved by the timing. We decided it would be inappropriate to run a speculative piece on a Tokyo quake when a real one had occurred. One of the best reports was written by New Zealand physicist Mark Sadgrove. He was one of the first to writers to report extensively on his experiences during the quake. Please read it HERE.

I’m very tired now. Feel jetlagged, very dizzy. The house is still shaking occasionally. Because we don’t have a television we are finding out news sporadically; have just heard about the imminent nuclear meltdown. Hannah just walked in from the convenience store with face masks. Can’t handle all this anxiety, need to buy a hardhat and go for a sleep in the park.

It costs ¥170 to travel from Akebonobashi to Shinjuku on the Toei Shinjuku Line. It costs ¥190 to travel from Yotsuya Sanchome to Ogikubo on the Marounouchi Line. It costs ¥160 to travel from Akebonobashi to Shibuya on the Toei Shinjuku Line changing at Shinjuku-Sanchome to the Fukutoshin Line. If you are desperate enough it is free to travel anywhere. You use a special technique to trick the gates. Do not buy a child’s ticket and pretend to be a child, you will not “get over.” An alarm will sound when you put your discounted ticket in, alerting others that you are a minor; public shame. Instead, you must carry with you a large tote bag, and it should be full of large flat objects: 12″ vinyl records and A3 sized magazines. Your friend walks through the ticket gate; places her electronic card onto the sensor; you hold the large bag out in front of you so it touches her slightly; she walks through the open metal gate. Now you must place your empty hand over the sensor — giving false reassurance to the ticket watchman that you have a travel card — and at the same time you must press in close to the other side of the bag. There must be no gaps between the first person, the bag, and yourself. The metal gates — astonished! They see a enormously long mass passing through, a horse perhaps, or a man carrying a mirror.

If the man unpacked his mirror it might be as tall as him. It might have a wooden frame and a stand so that it can remain upright without assistance. And with the mirror upright we would see two men inside the subway station, but only one has paid. And if he was to carry that mirror so that his reflection was always showing then these two people travel for half the price. Vast distances can be travelled, but the train system believes that only one person, not two, are behind the fare. However, I imagine that very intelligent metro systems view such swindling differently; they do not see an incredibly long mass (a horse, or mirror carrying man), I believe they see one real traveller of material value and nearby a hovering, valueless, immaterial spectre. This is how to ride the Tokyo metro as a spirit.

Shinjuku is a vertical place and spaces of value here must be identified according to their height. Demarcations: B2, B1, 1, 2, 3, 4. On Saturday night we visited a B2 space but they had a service charge of ¥500, so we left and visited a level 1 restaurant with cheap food (prices were stacked vertically on the walls in neon yellow). Afterwards we walked past a dance studio on level 2; we looked up to the dancers and Jon said, “I couldn’t imagine living opposite that dance studio, I just can’t even imagine it.” Later we would visit a cafe on levels 1 and 2, and finally we visited a bar on level 3 and collectively constructed an elaborate set of excellent jokes based around keywords and themes. For example, this was constructed around the words “lettuce, mushroom, tomato:”

Q. A tomato, a lettuce and a mushroom were riding a crowded subway train. What did the lettuce say to the tomato after the mushroom got off?

A. Lettuce off because there isn’t mushroom, tomato.

Photo of Jon Chandler, a UK comic artist who used to live in Tokyo. HERE is a good comic he made, distributed through Dan Nadel’s Picturebox.

East Tokyo is my favourite part of the city. The man made islands, separated by concrete bordered rivers; unknowable high rise apartments and quiet concrete pavements. Perhaps two housewives jogging and a single homeless man counting aluminium cans. Some cars, a few taxis. East Tokyo was art directed (in proxy) by JG Ballard.

It’s raining and after ten minutes of walking it begins to snow. Down into the basement of nanahari (HERE); very quiet, many wooden stools are set out. About fifteen people. Anthony Guerra playing guitar. He plays songs from his solo album of love songs “Empty Kingdoms,” and another song in the same vein. Extremely good (we listen to that album regularly); it’s a lonely one, dense and melodic; it’s Roy Orbison’s underwater guitar, sad, sick with love, sexually aroused, slowed down to a slur.

Anthony was an improviser in Sydney. Later, he lived in London: later, Tokyo, and here he collected records played more improvised music and married a woman called Aiko (they’re in a band called Green Blossoms, released on Digitalis! HERE). Unfortunately, two weeks ago they left Japan to permanently migrate back to Australia (via Europe). Before he left he played a string of final shows for each of his various musical incarnations; the video above is from his final solo-electric-love-song performance. Anthony is “highly recommended” by both The Wire, and Volcanic Tongue. You can see some of his releases on Mimaroglu HERE.

Top: European water placed by caterers at a conference hall in Shibuya-ku.
Middle: The snoopy blimp over Aoyama.
Bottom: A woman concerned about her ponytail on Teshima Island.

Out from the inside of an Abandoned Volcano Museum at the foot of Mt. Asama.

The sun doesn’t rise out of the earth and you can’t see it fall back into the earth. In Tokyo, when we woke up, I would sometimes open the window and sit inside the open frame, looking up to the small bits of sunless blue sky framed by four apartment blocks. You can never see the horizon from inside the city. It would be hours before the sun would suddenly appear above the wooden rooftop of the neighbouring apartment and mark a short band of yellow on the floor. We would sit in that band of light, eat breakfast in it, read books in it. It became a very precious resource over three years in that house. We never took the sun for granted, ever, but there is too much of it now.

Along with the sunlight, stories of precognitive dreams filled the air (also, the spirits of the recently deceased were there too). One story came from an old Korean man who was living nearby; he said that he dreamt about the quake three nights in a row before it hit. Walking back from the Tamagawa river he told me: “there were clouds of smoke hanging over Shinjuku, and big fires in Odaiba; a firestorm. I had to carry a plastic garbage bag full of clothes and books to my family who had escaped up to Saitama, but because the officials blocked off the roads north of Ikebukero my journey was impossible. So I tried to walk around, to go the long way, but I ended up beside the river, I think it was the Tamagawa. Then a group of men beat men and took my bags and I was defeated and sat in the thick smoke on the concrete banks of the river for two days. That was my dream.”

We sat next to him on one of the first trucks driving people out of the city. Hard seats on the trucks, can’t tell if they’re made from plastic or wood; every sensation is now fully striated and graduated. To see the world in its most primitive form; there is no road and no buildings, there are no homes, or private spaces; those categories have been invalidated. Now there are only triangular mounds of rubble. I don’t know where we are going or even what city we are in, it doesn’t look like Shinjuku anymore. Inside the truck we all stare out at the new horizon. It was not there before, obscured by offices and homes. Now the sky is full and victorious and the suns shine is inescapable.





Incredible photo by Matsuoka Yoshiaki taken in the days following the 1995 Kobe Earthquake and posted on the Wikipedia page about the same earthquake. This is on of the most affecting images i’ve seen in a long time, it surfaced while I was researching over past few weeks towards a speculative essay on earthquakes which will be published in the next issue of Spain’s Apartamento Magazine. Spending so much time thinking about the real effects of earthquakes and pouring through reportage from quakes around the world had a profound effect on my sense of safety. Then I received the above email from a family member and saw the news of the tragic earthquake in New Zealand and the sense of (un)safety turned to confusion. The whole thing is too real.

Thinking about it now, it is as though dreams, precognition and earthquakes are correlated; that there are ways of interfacing with disasters before they occur. Some interface we barely understand*. But to be honest, i’d say this train of thought is just my need for control struggling to make itself known amidst all the shaking.*

* On that interface: October 13th, 1989, Jim Berkland, a scientist, predicted the World Series quake in a local publication. Only two people took heed; a woman who secured her $6000 collection of antiques, and a research scientist who protected his laboratory work. Since then Berkland (HERE) predicted many other quakes since then and has tried to raise awareness about the ways that earthquakes communicate with humans.