Here is a shot I took in front of the Starbucks in Shibuya. That's Hachiko Square in the background. This is an extremely common site in Tokyo. People employed to be signposts.
I have seen people with similar jobs back home, but what's different about the Human Signposts here is that they don't walk around or even talk. They're a lot like the guards at Buckingham Palace, minus the funny hats, the rifles and the dignity.
As you can see, this job consists mainly of standing really still and not moving. Sadly, Human Signposts are rapidly being replaced by a new innovation, the Metal Signpost.
The Metal Signpost is superior to the Human Signpost in many ways. You don't have to feed it, nor do you have to tell it what a good job it's doing. There's no need to make inane office chatter nor remember its wife's name at the Christmas party. All you have to do is make sure it doesn't rust.
We all talk about "globalization" and how "the world is getting smaller" but the reality of progress is that the world is becoming less and less personal and more and more artificial.
Everywhere I turn, there is a new type of plastic where there once was a flower. Every time I look up into the sky, I see not the sun and clouds, rather I see omnious grey giants of concrete and steel.
Sometimes we are so caught up in this progress of ours, that we forget what makes us human. Every now and then, we have to step back and ask ourselves, "What is more important, cost-efficiency or the warm fuzzy feeling we get when we walk by a person with signs strapped to their body?"
I think you know the answer as well as I do.
It's sad to see an art form become extinct. But like so many other skills rendered obsolete by today's new technology (such as sword fighting and paper-making), we can only hope that it is preserved through the efforts of a few dedicated individuals, so that our children and our children's children can have the priviledge of experiencing being inanimate.
This is a shot of the interior of a Doutor cafe. Get a load of this. They don't have things like this back home in Tim Horton's. We're lucky if we even have napkins on the table, let alone a spiralling crystal sculpture in the middle of a large fountain. I got a cuppa joe, Aubs got a tuna sandwich and a danish. We sat there for 30 minutes gawking at the table beside us because the girl there had an iBook.
As you may or may not know, I have been a little self-conscious about the colour of my cellphone ever since I got it. I'm not really the macho type, but the powder blue was drawing stares on the train and on the street whenever I whipped it out.
Aubs and I were walking through a rather shitty department store, when I happened across a little booth that decorated cellphones. I chose this design because the base colour was close to the colour of my phone, but a little darker. Also, the design suits my little skull nicely.
The process took 20 minutes and cost me about 1,500 yen. Who says you can't buy happiness?
I have to pay for my plane ticket tomorrow, and it has to be in cash. It is so strange that in such a highly-developed country, that the credit card is still virtually non-existent.