A tale of two (distant) cities

Photography by Alexander Bee

After his recent trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, Alexander Bee shares his innermost thoughts and comparisons on these two extraordinarily diverse cities.

I spent seven days aboard the post-imperial archipelago, and its dextrous pastel shades of flag-waving and Pikachu were enough to cut the breath from my chest. Never have I felt so thoroughly eroded than in the slipstream Tokyo (東京, Eastern Capital) ejects from every neon-flashing valve at an urban wanderer. The sheer experiential force of a 24-hours spent in Tokyo would be enough to power a rural village if generated nerve energy could be harvested. Like a modern day ‘city of the plain,’ Tokyo’s impulses are designed to align with its wanderers - pulsing first for gluttony, then fatigue, next lust and within seconds back again. Like a Los Angeles attached to several flashing hyperdrives of 1960s Sci-fi programming, this Gomorrah for the Red Dwarf generation floats water-hazed visions of fire and brimstone around every raw scrubbed corner. In scale, its grandiosity would have given Mehmed pause. Faced with its sheer appetite for destruction, Martin IV would have set down his Vernaccia for a hiccup. Tokyo exceeds in inflation and inhibition anything Rabelais could have conjured, fielding a modern vision so thoroughly of pore and gland that it could have risen from nothing but full abandonment of will to propriety. Instead of providing backdrop for a series of events in the traditional civic pattern, Tokyo-time is bled like molten glass into an elongated flow-plane of indeterminate colour and infinite length.

For this seasoned Sino-centric, Tokyo was an exercise in the bipolar: a clinical trial with electrified proboscises in both the dorsal and dopamine cortexes of the brain. Over-engagement with pop culture excess under the trip’s first risen sun subsumed both my companion and I in a violent tailspin handed only to the most unfortunate of fighter pilots. Neither pluck nor companionship could save us from the ear-ringing, nerve-buzzing pain of attempting to sleep after witnessing Huxley and all his prescience outdone by malnourished performing arts students, whirling half-naked around molten plastic Gargantua at Shibuya’s ‘Robot Cafe’. The road to hell isn’t paved with anything you could have found in Babylon; rather the steps are to be taken by braying mortals over stacked shards of mirror upon plastic upon strapless bras, smashed from the costume of entertainment so gluttonous even Nero might have wrinkled his nose.

Photography by Alexander Bee

To find a Cornwallian slice of pastoral peace only two hours along the Shinkansen was, then, to awaken as Egil in the realm beyond. Outlines in Kyoto were ringed with the halos of anachronistic Byzantine oils and the silence was almost religious in its gentle ferocity. Where wasp needles of anime themes had poured without end from pachinko slots and flares had burst from pavement-to-sky neon, now peace crowed its supremacy. Artificial lighting capitulated to the greater demands of nightly peace and green spaces dominated the curving skyline. Designed around the old and the on tour, Heian-kyo (平安京) has clung to the character its ancient name prescribed. The ‘Peaceful Capital’ does exactly what, as Timothy Spall might say, ‘it says on the tin’. December in our light-panelled ryokan (旅館 / ‘travel inn’) was an Eastern conjuring of imagined Tudor Christmases. In place of British ham was oil-drizzled tonkatsu; instead of ornate fireplaces a candle-lit common room. Hotel residents filtered in and out of the city like light trails in endless exposures. By night our Peaceful Capital dipped to darkest Conrad for a view of the milky way, unmatched in urban confines since Offa took a spade to the Welsh. Our tour of Kyoto featured little more than a stately anti-Christmas of urban-enclave Shinto shrines and Buddhist retreats lashed with bamboo and faith into the mountainside. With each step on the potterer’s trail a trapped nerve came free - cobble and artisan sanding over tower block trauma as gently as an ocean soothing broken glass. Our time amidst the burnished sunsets and soft-grain garnishes of main street and pontocho stood as sublime and soothing antithesis to the immolating fever of their cousin.

Photography by Alexander Bee

Had Janus himself been tasked with building twin cities, the results would have lacked for polarity in comparison to the capitals of East and Peace. In all things is Kyoto the Mary of the Shelleys – quiet and content with pace for its own sake. Yet as our bullet train sped us back to Narita, I found myself pondering as the eroding Ozymandias - what good is time at a standstill? What good the galactic violence of a solar flare if no calm gives context to its force? Were not Mary and Percy just as inseparable as they were incompatible? Tokyo and Kyoto are perversely inverse - the fabric of one folded into the other and trussed up so tightly the seams have become invisible. Just as the heights of happiness are only known through a lived-in skein of misery, so the post-imperial metropoles are co-dependent parasites. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ inscribes Kyoto, ‘that colossal wreck’ of a time gone by. ‘Look on mine!’ Tokyo shouts through its thriving decay. All the engaged traveller need do is hop on a train and soak in the poetry of their barbaric incompatibility.