The grass in Tokyo’s parks is coarser than Victoria, but not as coarse as Queensland. The buildings are square and immense, lots of vertical space. The people are just a constant stream, sometimes a trickle, sometimes a river depending on where and when you are walking, but like water and vapor they are always present. The city is quieter than you might expect, the skyscrapers are like Manhattan but there are no card horns blaring, no street musicians playing, no loud and excessively extraverted conversations happening. People largely follow the rules here, keeping to themself and keeping quiet. There is sparse conversation on the subways, only the train platforms are loud in the city. Even the emergency vehicles are quieter than Turtle island/North America. I’ve heard it said that Japan is the country of introverts, and I’m starting to see that the society’s rules in Tokyo are conducive to that, even fostering it. There are restaurants that you can pre-order and sit at a single booth and get the food handed to you without ever talking to anyone else. The Japanese gardens are Gorgeously designed, I’ve heard of there being 6 principles they follow: asymmetry, enclosure, borrowed scenery, balance, symbolism, and naturality. Sounds like a thoughtful recipe to me, and the manifestation of the principles is beautifully serene and elegantly aesthetic.
The nightlife is intense in Shinjuku, the neon depictions in media are accurate, but I was unprepared for the number of “Girls bars” and “boys bars” – the red light district is not the only place they appear. I looked into the eyes of some of the young women working at one; I did not get good vibes from those places, inside or out. The many African expat men employed to befriend young solo travelling men and guide and funnel you into the girls bars was curious social piece I navigated as the night went on. Happily, before that time, I wondered into a celebration of Obon Festival, a merging of Buddhist and Shinto to customarily honour the japanese ancestors. The unique rhythmic Taiko drum beats from atop the skeletal tower in the middle of the great circular crowd was the music that guided the master Bon Odori dancers at the platform around the tower base, as the crowd copied the Bon Odori dances along with the masters in multiple slow, repeating dances that rotated the crowd all the way around, song after song. A cultural highlight so far.
I’ve been navigating sleep and hostel life for 6 days now, the current place I’m writing from is a coworking space on the second floor of this 6-floor hostel – it’s a bit of a party hostel with free alcohol (sake) anytime of day, and a free drink (happy hour) between 7-8pm. I’ve made some good connections here, Dach from Scotland, and Fernando from Brazil/Switzerland, and Matthew from Canada too.
Fernando is a Swiss CEO of a Crypto company that specializes in real-world-assets (RWA) tokens to provide liquidity to companies for their assets. Very valuable is his service, working with scalable equity movement, all over the world. Our conversation turned into him offering to be my coaching client, as long as our connection happened online through my own website, and I set up a Pay-what-you-want system. I’m taking him up on that, as soon as I fix my website which I broke yesterday trying to update to PHP 8.0 from 7.2.4 LOLOLOLOL. The dude had his own system structures – similar but different to the ones I’ve been learning to implement. His 3 pillars were exercise (80% effort, 20% results), education & mindfulness (20% effort, 80% results). He also was trying to coin what he called Effective Entrepreneurship – the effective part being the ability to help others at scale – everyone is an entrepreneur but not everyone is effective. We walked through the Imperial palace grounds together, talking about many topics. He said that the business world is WAR, and the winner takes all. I’m hard-pressed to be entering into war, yet I’m interested in touching the business world with what I do. I will now take my efforts toward fixing my website again so that I can post this and integrate my mailchimp list onto my site.
Update: kinda fixed it, PHP isn’t updated yet, and I can’t upload images to my wordpress media gallery. I’ll keep working.