Over the recent long weekend, I discovered the Japanese revenge flick Hard Revenge, Milly1, which is set (from what I can tell) in a semi-post-apocalyptic Yokohama. In the prologue for the movie the audience is told that Tokyo has been consumed by desert, while Yokohama remains green, which presents a problem.
For those of you not familiar with the Greater Tokyo Area, I'll point out that the distance between Yokohama and Metropolitan Tokyo is shorter than the distance between Hamilton and Toronto, or between Seattle and Tacoma, and is about the same distance as Queens is from Staten Island.
So, in other words, the desertification of Tokyo would have a serious effect on the Yokohama area.
From this, I'm reminded of the tsunami of 2011, where the epicenter of the original quake was closer to Tokyo than Ottawa is to Toronto, and the entirety of Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago, is roughly the distance between Windsor and Quebec City. Honshu is also the home of the majority of Japan's population, which is roughly 128 million people, with a population density of about 377 people per km2 . For comparison, Canada's population is roughly 34.5 million, with about 3.4 people per km2, giving us around 1% of the population density of Japan.
These thoughts got me wondering what the definition of space is in Japan, and how the average Japanese (as a nation, not ethnicity) person perceives distance when everything is so (comparatively) close, including your neighbour.
The movie, assuming that there is a somewhat down-to-earth representation of Japanese perception involved (which, admittedly, might be a stretch considering that it's a low-budget exploitation flick), seems to illustrate a disconnect involving the perception of distance and how that maps (literally) to the rest of the world. In makes me wonder if centuries of isolation, and decades of urban sprawl, have defined a different perception of how big the world is, and how much space there is out there between places.
I imagine that a country the size of Canada, with the distance between places, and the focus on 'space' is quite alien to someone who's never left the archipelago. The reverse of this is how the average Canadian would react to the ability to travel from coast to coast on a train in a couple of hours.
Myself, I've got a thing about personal space, and I suspect that I would not do well with the population density in Japan, at least on Honshu. I think I'd probably even have troubles on Hokkaido, the northern-most island, with its lower density and, well, earthquakes.
So, I think I need to fire off an email to my friend in Tokyo about this, as it's got me wondering.
-----
1 The comma is not a typo.
This is mighty interesting actually. We really don't get it much in North America, but think about the self imposed segregation of that various ethnic groups brought with them in the turn of last century. Also, the idea that you could tell what street a person lived on by their cultural characteristics even within the same city (at least according Shaw in Pygmalion). It seemed that this space compression was common in many cities 100+ years back. I think it's mostly gone even in Europe now, but Japan might have found a way to keep it going.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's interesting, and it also links into the birth of organized crime in North America, much like how the various Triad organizations evolved out of the various resistance movements over the centuries in mainland China.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think the neighborhood cultural identity thing still exists in the Greater London Area, where the different areas (such as Guildford, to use something from Douglas Adams) have regional dialects, or so I'm to understand.
For that matter, I can even see this in my own family, as we have terms that only our immediate family uses like 'over-home', and this is probably due to our penchant for being insular and anti-social , thus creating a micro-culture of our own.