Late Thursday afternoon we took part in a ritual of post-modern madness after surfacing from the Shibuya subway exit. I felt it was a way of balancing Japanese extremes. A few days into our trip we hiked to a deserted mountain temple and yesterday, towards the end of our journey, we joined the welter of humanity piling up to surge across a city intersection from five different directions.
From persons to people, it was like a sped-up version of evolution, population zero morphing into the clamor of a crowd. Then, to view the stop-and-go flow from above, we bought overpriced drinks at a third-floor corner Starbucks and sat like mythological gods observing mass behavior below.
This post made me think of the film “Koyaanisqatsi”. I liked watching the film but I thought your post had more balance.
I once traveled to a film festival in Newfoundland with Alton Walpole who shot the film with Godfrey Reggio who was a Buddhist monk living in Santa Fe. He said the hardest thing about shooting the movie was trying to get their film gear out of China.