Seated at the counter of a 24-hour self-service bookshop in Taitō-ku, any doubt about my chosen theme has slipped away. Having arrived in Tokyo last night, I’m spending this morning settling in, watching the first wave of commuters pass outside as the writing window of this trip gently opens.
The first series of Field Notes, launched in June this year, documented my walk along the length of the Chūō Line. It was a journey measured in hundreds of thousands of steps and the heft of a backpack. Slow in its method of crossing the city on foot, yet unrelenting in schedule, each day pushed me to keep pace if I was to reach the next hotel by nightfall. In every neighbourhood I remained a passer-by, no more than a wayfaring stranger.
This time, I considered escaping the city’s late summer heat¹, following the temperature map into Tokyo’s surrounding regions in search of relief. For weeks now, I’ve turned this over alongside other ideas, each requiring a great deal of movement. But in truth, I am worn down from an intense spring and summer, and still carrying the faint after-effects of a recent illness². What I need from travel now is not a driving mission, but stillness and rejuvenation. What I need is something more akin to a travel loop³.
A travel loop is about staying in one place long enough to know it beyond the surface and to find one’s own rhythm within its bounds. And so, the second instalment of Field Notes will centre on routines and patterns—walking the city, sustaining creative practice, and, above all, restoring body and soul. Days established by low-tech living and early morning zazen; evenings steeped in a traditional diet and local sento bathing.
The scope of this loop will extend across several neighbourhoods, yet Field Notes still needs geographic parameters to give it form. A recent rewatch of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days led me to situate myself in the shitamachi (下町), the ‘Low City’. Like Hirayama, the film’s protagonist, I will greet each day before sunrise—under blue-grey light, with crows overhead and Skytree appearing between the narrow lanes of eastern Tokyo.
As for what the shitamachi constitutes, exactly, Edward Seidensticker puts it well in Low City, High City:
The Low City has always been a vaguely defined region, its precise boundaries difficult to draw. It sometimes seems like as much an idea as a geographic entity.
I will return to the shitamachi in Field Notes, but briefly: it is a grouping of districts bound to Tokyo’s Edo past, once home to merchants, artisans, and entertainers—recalled in flashes of creativity and decadence, as well as squalor. Some neighbourhoods I know; many are unfamiliar. I will come to understand them through a series of Station Circuits⁴, across an area that spans from Ueno Park in the west to Kameido in the east, and from Minami-Senju in the north down to Fukagawa in the south. Together we will explore the historical context and urban fabric of these neighbourhoods, while visiting their coffee shops, bookstores, galleries, greenways, and more.
Kameido, at the loop’s eastern edge, is the neighbourhood where Hirayama makes his home. Beneath his mild manner, the cleaner proves more complex than he first seems, his mind as susceptible to chaos as any other. As a result, his solace in discipline—waking before dawn each day and devoting himself to the cleaning of toilets, a task he all but turns into a craft—becomes all the more inspiring.
Each morning I will begin with a deliberate routine of walking and writing, sending you the morning sheets I produce. The journey begins tomorrow. It is not too late to join as a member and follow along. For those wishing to sample Field Notes, the three-day trial I opened in last week’s newsletter is still open, but will close within the next 24 hours.
Until we meet at sunrise,
AJ
Links
¹ Endless Summer
² The Tokyo Archives
³ Travel Loops
⁴ Wanderlust Frameworks