Already Seen

Tokyo/Los Angeles, November 10, 2023

Walking from Harajuku to Shibuya, I come upon images of the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, but not from his actual films, but from my head. Or what I think are his images, but filtered through my sensibility, on the top of a building that looks like water towers but is designed in that modernistic Japanese style that embraces the present but with something nostalgic about its past. I can never put my finger on it, but I feel the remains of a lost time whenever I see something like that.

A well-thought-out sign of civilization is public bathrooms and clocks in a metropolis. Los Angeles lacks both, and often, it is uncomfortable to walk on its streets and make uninviting gestures not to be part of the human race, which is OK because I never felt invited to participate in such a relationship.

A park separates Harajuku and Shibuya, and one walks by the NHK Hall and Broadcasting Center. I have been here on the weekends, and it is crowded with dog walkers and people. Food stalls fill the space here, but on a weekday, it is like the last scene in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, as the Joseph Cotton figure waits for the woman of his dreams to pass him by.

I have been back and forth to Japan since 1989, and it never fails when I’m back in Los Angeles; I feel Tokyo was a dream and not an actual location. I wonder if my imagination made up Tokyo or why the city reflects an alternative reality. On the way home and the freeway, I can see Downtown Los Angeles, which looks much like Oz. So yes, debating this thought, I agree that Tokyo is real, and Los Angeles is more based on dreams and illusion. It is one of the reasons why I love this part of the world.