In 1966, the French intellectual group Les Situationniste (The Situationists) released a twenty-page manifesto titled “De la Misère en Milieu Étudiant” (On the Poverty of Student Life). The Situationists set out to critique post-war capitalism, arguing it achieved disastrous effects on the economic, political, psychological, sexual, and intellectual wellbeing of French society. Their manifesto made their mission clear; they wanted nothing less than to hijack society’s trajectory and reroute it away from the spectacles of post-war capitalism, away from image-mediated social relations, away from consumption-contingent identities, and toward a social structure that re-prioritized communal living, self-initiated creativity, and subjectivity, among other so-termed authentic desires.
If one measures the influence of The Situationaists’ work on French society by the extent to which it was followed by periods of complete civil unrest, then one can argue that their mission was a success. By May of 1968, one and a half years after De la Misère en Milieu Étudiant was published, France was rocked by waves of protests whose size and force had not been seen since the Jacobins took up arms against the Royalists during the French Revolution. The May ‘68 protesters made their mission clear; they wanted nothing less than to hijack society’s trajectory and reroute it away from Western capitalism and consumerism and toward a social structure that prioritized the working class. Eleven million workers, about 22% of France’s population, from all sectors participated in a general strike. They collaborated with students from the Sorbonne to ignite daily street battles with the police in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Even artists lent their skills by creating a range of protest art in the form of songs, imaginative graffiti, posters, and slogans, many of which came from situations texts.
Mass collaboration proved to be an effective tactic. By the end of May, the De Gaulle government had largely caved to the protestors’ demands. The Grennelle accords, finalized on May 27th, resulted in a 35% increase in the minimum wage and 10% increase in average real wages, as well as the establishment of trade union specific to the business sector, all huge wins for the working class. In one short month, The Situationists had made their mark on French history, forever rerouting its trajectory.
Space played a prominent role in The Situationists theorizing. The term “situationist” refers to the idea that Western capitalism exerts control over the individual not through direct force, but by controlling the situation, the environment, in which individuals make decisions. Ubiquitous advertising, on TVs, in radio, and on billboards, featuring the commodification of life experiences, coupled with the glorification of accumulated capital visible in our clothes, cars, even in the architecture of our urban spaces, creates a situation, an environment, in which it is near impossible for individuals to make decisions, big or small, short of long term, without adhering to the false desires promoted by Western capitalism. Tired? Grab a Starbucks. Bored? Go to this vacation resort. Unpopular? Buy this new apartment. Lonely? Throw a wedding. Big or small, short or long term, in Western contexts, all decisions invariably support capitalism. Breaking from capitalism, then, requires a complete revision of the situation. To be a “Situationist” meant to critically analyze the capitalist situation in which individual decisions are made, and to curate your own “situation” in which individuals can counteract the alienating and dehumanizing forces of capitalism and connect with their creativity, their subjectivity, and other authentic desires. Seeking these emancipatory situations can become a life’s purpose, the aim being to reawaken authentic desires, experiencing the transcendent qualities of human emotions, and the liberating phenomenology of the everyday.
Through writing, The Situationists formalized their radical theories for modern French society, but like any great manifesto, they needed a praxis; a tangible process that everyday people could embody as part of their everyday lives, experimenting and iterating on their own terms along the way. The Situationists chose the city as the laboratory where their theories could be put to test. After all, for The Situationists, the city was a profoundly ideological entity. The urban fabric of a city like Paris glorified certain narratives and marginalized others. Château de Versailles, Palais du Luxembourg, Palais de Elysée, along with the rest of Paris’s great palaces emphasize the idea of the glorification of accumulated capital. Elysée, Paris’s most storied boulevard, is now lined with luxury stores, exemplifies the dominance of modern consumerism. The Eiffel Tower was once used as a giant billboard for a car advert. There is a McDonalds in the Louvre. The point is that no matter where you go, the urban realm speaks – sometimes yells – back at you, telling you who matters, who doesn’t, what you should crave, and who is in charge. The city even tells you who are. We have a wide lexicon of totalizing nouns we readily apply to people inhabiting different urban spaces. In the metro? You are a commuter. Top floor of an office tower? Likely a CEO. At the university? Probably a student. Walking down the street? You are pedestrian. Gay bar? Speaks for itself. Your name, feelings, or perspective do not matter. In the city, your urban situation is enough to define you.
If urban situations enforce pre-specified ideologies and identities, then the intentional miss-use of urban situations is an emancipatory praxis. The Situationists used the word dérive (“drift”) to describe a type of urban miss-use where a person drops their usual motives of movement in, actions on, and relations with urban situations, instead allowing themselves to be drawn by emotional resonances, transitory curiosities, imaginative exploration, and serendipitous sensory stimulations of light, sounds, smells, and textures. To drift means to reject the Euclidean space and the ontology of discrete urban categories built on top, instead navigated the city as if it were a shifting sea of liminal states. To drift is inherently anti-functionalist, anti-efficient, making it de facto anti-establishment. To drift is radical, even if all it involved is walking aimlessly through the city. It is an insubordination of habitualized patterns of urban behaviour. It is a way of reconnecting with our most intimate drives. Anybody can drift through the city. Even me.
Drifting was on my mind in the spring of 2017. At that time, I had successfully transitioned from graduate school into my first professional job. It was a job I enjoyed and was happy to focus my attention on. But like a ship’s anchor dropped at hightide, my heart remained tethered to the past. I would reminisce of a time when I life was more open, free, and emotionally dynamic than the present. Three years prior, I was running around Melbourne with an Australian lover who changed my life. Something inside of me was telling me there was more for us to do together. Not one to get stuck in nostalgia, I knew I had to call Ben.
Three years prior, Ben successfully completed a complex open-heart surgery on me. Not literally, of course. But figuratively, yes. Like an expert metaphysician, he diagnosed my condition, seamlessly inserted himself into my chest cavity, and excised and repaired a damaged section. At that time of my life, I was on the brink of giving up. He saved me. He took my hand and together we drifted to another dimension. We drifted into Melbourne’s interstitial spaces, to back-alley dive bars in the middle of the steely night, flying foxes overhead. In these interstitial spaces, we could shrug the burdensome expectations society placed on us and awaken our authentic desires. We could embody ourselves fully. In the steely night, flying foxes overhead, we would goad the day, taunting it to claim us, believing it never could because for one, for the first time ever, we were brighter than the day. Now, three years later, it was as if it was all a dream. My current life was so far removed from the urgency of romance. I was losing track of my authentic desires. It was time to reconnect.
The call was made. In the spring of 2017, after a series of cross-continental conversations, we decided to meet in Tokyo. Although a sensible midpoint between Canada and Australia, the decision to meet in Tokyo was not driven by pragmatism. Skype would have sufficed if it were up to pragmatism. We needed more than that. I needed to see his face. I needed to sense his movements through space again. I needed to hear his voice resonate off the inner chambers of my ears. I need to see him in person, and Tokyo seemed the ideal place to do it. Ideal because Tokyo has all the familiar spectacle – bright lights, big buildings, pretty people – of any other major metropolis, but as an east Asian city, was different in significant ways to our existing mental models of how cities should look. The buildings in Tokyo are closer together, the streets narrower, there are fewer thoroughfares, more pedestrians, there are temples and palaces. It’s altogether unlike any western urban experience, but not completely unfamiliar. Walking through Tokyo enforces a kind of detached caution from the Western visitor. Westerners cannot take Tokyo’s urban form at first glance. If they did, they would miscategorise a prison as a school, a cemetery as a shrine, a house as a café. The visual language, both its semantics (content) and syntax (composition), is different here. It’s easy to get lost in translation.
And that was the point. The point was to get lost is an urban language of unknown signifiers. The point was to use Tokyo as a tool to destabilize our patterned ways of thinking, to render uncertain our rationality, so that we could, were forced to, trust and intimate drives and use our emotions as guides, both within Tokyo and between the two of us. The point was to drift.
Forty-one (41) million people live in Tokyo. Forty-one million. That’s bigger than the entire population of Canada. It’s also the biggest on earth. The biggest. Not second biggest. Not third. Tokyo is the biggest. Almost ten million more people than Delhi, the second biggest. More than double than live in the New York metropolitan area. An unbelievable number of people by Western standards, all residing in 13,000 square kilometres of land surrounding a large bay on the eastern slopes of Mount Fuji.
Tokyo’s size can only be comprehended from high altitudes, like when flying in by plane. From this vantage, the city looks like the surface of a calcified rock, with buildings sticking out like stalagmite clusters. At night, Tokyo looks like a zoom-in shot of the milky way interspersed with groups of bright galaxies. Day or night, from this vantage, there is the appearance of order – or at least, a harmony. The city is, for the most part, homogenous in form, being predominantly filled with slender towers about ten stories tall. The buildings reach higher near the city’s centre point, as well as along an interlace network of sinuous transit corridors. Three massive green blobs – Yoyogi, Shinjuku Gyoen, and Chidorigafuchi park – overtake the urban form around the downtown. Docks the size of neighbourhoods stretch like fingers out into the bay water. In the distance, toward the east, Mount Fuji expands outwards in an elegant pyramidal form.
It’s impossible not to feel awe from this vantage. Tokyo’s size, its sublime magnitude, demand deference. Any approaching foreigner is bound to be intimidated. The city reaches beyond the farthest stretch of the Western imagination, yet it is clearly real. An apt definition, I thought, for awe. For the sublime. For moments when emotion wins over rationality. Like love; beyond imagination – better than – yet real. You can’t help but have your emotions awakened.
Already, from the plane, Tokyo was stirring me. I was anxious to explore the city. I was also anxious to see Ben again. Was he the same as when we first met? Would we connect like we did before? What were the dimensions of his heart today? I was curious to know, and I felt that, perhaps, in exploring the city, in drifting in between emotional resonances, we could, him and I, explore the space that existed between us.
As if as a soft start to Tokyo’s grandeur, international victors land in Narita, an airport town located 60 kilometres east of the city centre in an region loosely populated by quaint, modest (<10,000 people) towns and heavy agriculture in-between. Already, a poignant, quintessentially Japanese juxtaposition can be observed in the landscape: most houses and structures, with their elegant pyramidal forms made of clay tile, are built in the traditional, vernacular style dating back hundreds of years, yet they are complimented by a gamut of technological accoutrements that enhance all manner of infrastructural functionalities. High tech agricultural equipment, slender cell towers, task-specific lories, and the most well-kempt freeways you have ever seen, make it obvious that technology permeates all aspects of Japanese life. Moreover, it communicates a clear message about Japanese culture: We are not afraid of the future, but we will never forget our past. The fact that these observations are made from a high-speed train that feels like you are floating on a cloud (one that travels >200 km per hour) makes these observations even more acute.
Within the span of a revitalizing nap, visitors arrive in central Tokyo from Narita. Despite travelling at velocities all but incomprehensible to Westerners, the train’s arrival into the station is soft and seamless.
This experience signals another trend of Japanese society; technology, in general, and in opposition to Western standards, has a humanizing effect. That is, the human experience is a priority of most Japanese technological interventions, whether be the seamless arrival of a train at the station, the curtesy robots that great visitors at store entryways, or heated toilet seats in public washrooms. Each of these interventions, along with thousands of others, strives to improve the human experience. In contrast, Western technological interventions are often brute and focus on enhancing power gain. For a Westerner, the granularity of technological integrations present in Japan at first feels patronizing, almost invasive. Eventually, though, their charm disarms the most hardened observer to where they too expect all toilet seats be heated.
The underground complex of Tokyo’s Central Station is a well-organized system of tunnels replete with shops, kiosks, food stalls, and trinket stores. And people. Many, many people. A dizzying array of people. The beautiful thing about Tokyo is that, because it is over 800 years old, the city has a long history of sustaining and accommodating the lifestyles of all ages of residents, be they 8 or 80. Like most big cities around the world, young people buzz between shops and cafes in and around the full cast of working professionals dressed in business regalia. But more than those age ranges, it’s not uncommon to also see children, accompanied by their keepers, walk to school, holding hands, on the busy downtown sidewalks. Golden seniors, too, stroll through the urban theatre in stoic form, as if walking through an ancient garden. They emerge in the mid-morning from nearby apartments to make errand runs, circling through the park, saying hello to acquaintances on their way. Tokyo’s golden seniors, along with its children, extend the range of identifiable instances of human habitation within the city centre, and are a direct product of rich mix of uses present in nearly all of Tokyo’s neighbourhoods, including the core; apartments are squeezed in between office towers stacked on top of supermarkets, schools, and shopping malls, all the amenities for daily life. This city is not just about money. This city is also about humanity.
I arrived in Tokyo a couple days before Ben. I set out to familiarize myself with the new city and to visit some of the more eccentric sites I had on my list – far off art galleries, Shinto shrines, artisan bakeries – which aren’t always palatable to others. My strategy was simple: pick a series of destinations and link them together with semi-guided wandering, as if I were connecting beads on a necklace. Taught lines were not necessary; slack adds style. I knew wandering – drifting – was a tool I could use to uncover the overlooked, interstitial moments urban experience. Afterall, for an 800-year-old city with over 41 million inhabitants and layers and layers of built form, there were sure to intense atmospheres, historic anchors, sacred secrets, nestled in between tourist sites. It was these experiences that I was most attracted to. I knew drifting was how I would find them.
And I was right. As if crawling the scales of a massive, sleeping dragon, Tokyo becomes surmountable through intimate navigation of its interstitial spaces. Not only surmountable, but gentle, tranquil, and cooperative. The neighbourhoods are comprised of a dense network of residential side streets bifurcating in fractal form like capillaries oxygenating cells in the human body. They reach everywhere, and any of them could be the backdrop of a movie; 2-storey, 4-storey, and 6-storey apartment buildings, connected at off-kilter angles, create a collage of brick, concrete, stone, and tile. Clothes hang on wires strung across streets, between lampposts that light, in pockmark pattern, the pavement below. Cats prowl among the house plants, shrines, bicycles, broomsticks, and vines that dress entryways. Solitary vending machines illuminate street corners in ambient neon haze. Through what can only be described as urban poetry, Tokyo’s side streets accommodate the dimensions, the drama, of life not by virtue of what they directly signify, but by what they leave space for. They are the perfect backdrop to a movie.
Enter stage right, me. New to the city, it was my chance to drift the city before Ben’s arrival. We were staying in Setagaya, a residential neighbourhood just west of the city centre. I had just spent 18 hours in transit and was ready to explore. It was late morning on a Saturday, and I set out eastward, toward Meji Shrine, toward Chiyoda City, toward Shibuya. Not necessarily to; toward was enough.
From the perspective of a Western visitor, the street signs written in Kanji indicating neighbourhood boundaries are completely indecipherable. As a result, and when one doesn’t exclusively rely on their phone, we are forced to connect to changes in the urban atmosphere to determine whether I was headed in our intended direction. Imagine estimating the weather from feel as opposed to a computer. I had a friend who once said she could feel in her bones when it was about to rain, as if she were a human divining rod. My task was similar. In Tokyo, I was to decipher city boundaries using implicit cues in the urban atmosphere. Doing so helped me build a mental map of the city. One where districts were defined not by names or function, but by form and feeling. I had to register changes in building height, street texture, paths of least resistance, luminance levels, smells, density and composition of people, topological shifts, gaze intensities, floral fecundity, among other cues, some not even reaching conscious awareness, building “clusters” of “urban atmospheres” along the way. It didn’t matter if I was correct. That is, it didn’t matter if my boundaries correlated with official neighbourhood boundaries. All that mattered were that they were valid to me; that I had implemented my own rigorous data collection process and that I was confident in the derived conclusions. That, and – I remember thinking – they registered as valid to Ben, too.
Between Setagaya and the centre city laid a dense urban matrix of all manner of inner-city atmospherics. Setagaya is largely residential, but it’s a residential that is unfamiliar to North Americans; here, density is the name of the game. The residential towers reach 12-storeys upwards and connect to each other on either side, creating a flush barrier of balconies that front the streets. At their bases, Udon shops, kindergartens, laundromats, and the cleanest 7-Elevens you have ever seen, filled with takeaway onigiri. Another unfamiliarity for North Americans is the fact that the streets in Tokyo, for the most part, meander around the shape of the bay, the parks, the larger buildings, and – of course – the temples. The streets of Tokyo do not follow the brute logic of a top-down grid. Even the larger thoroughfares alter their pathways in accordance with the dictates of the built form below, making for a more harmonious integration of infrastructure that stands in stark contrast to the domineering logic imposed by the major thoroughfares, including interstates, of American cities.
But that’s not to say there is no logic to Tokyo’s street structure. There is a logic. There are forces at play, albeit more akin to the gravitational forces that organize planetary bodies in our solar system. Activity zones like Shinjuku, Shimokitazawa, and of course, Shibuya, pull at the surrounding streets so that most, inevitably, intersect at a centre point. It is at these centre points, such as Shibuya crossing, where Tokyo’s technological exceptionalism and maximalist aesthetic are placed on full view. The buildings glisten like beacons in the night sky, bedazzling with bursts of neon lights advertising all manner of nighttime pleasures. In some cases, the lights aren’t just additions to a building façade – they form the façade itself. Godzilla-sized beauty queens glide seamless cross skyscrapers, advertising lip-gloss. Buildings shaped like perfume bottles sparkle in the night sky, like diamonds under inspection. On the ground level, in the evenings, throngs of Tokyoites circulate through inner-city streets, on the hunt for food, friends, and beer. Beer, which was first introduced by the Dutch in the 17th century, is an immensely popular drink in Japan today. Restaurant patrons spill out into the streets, beers in hand, sitting on short stools eating late-night takeout on makeshift tables. It's a flurry of activity, and it’s impossible not to feel the pull.
And so I let myself be pulled in whichever way Tokyo chose for the first few days, soloing the city before Ben’s arrival. It suited me well, this type of bottom-up exploration of a foreign city. Too much of North America does no one any good. Besides, this preface provided me the time to indulge in my more esoteric interests, like throwback vintage stores, design deal emporiums, and far off (physically and conceptually) art galleries. I didn’t want to subject Ben to that. If you’re going to be strange, you can’t enforce your strangeness on someone else. And so I did my strange. I indulged in my strange. For several days, I visited everywhere I could, criss-crossing Tokyo’s urban expanse like a madman running a marathon, checking off tourist sites as if they were items on my shopping list. By the end of first few days, I had visited my pre-registered destinations, albeit in a hurried way, leaving space for a more open-ended engagement following Ben’s arrival.
I wanted to give us space. Space to explore the city, as well as space between us to explore each other. Space, not distance. Space, as in a conceptual space between his perspective and mine. Between his world view and my own. I wanted to see them. I wanted to know them. I wanted to honour them. I wanted him to have the agency to navigate his own world, chart his own geography of meaning, so that later, with his permission, I could study the resulting map to uncover the patterns of his personality. What’s more, we could cross-reference our geographies, and, with courage, drift between our respective landmarks of meaning to, hopefully, discover new forms, new points of intersection, and new regions that we could both inhabit together.
And so my time had come. Ben’s arrival was set for nine o’clock on the Friday evening, and we agreed to meet at Tokyo’s most potent intersection – Shibuya crossing. This rendezvous point had a potency to it. Underneath the brilliant lights of Shibuya, I knew the moment would hit with a bang. Albeit a more intimate bang. A bang whose potency is derived not from brute force but from something more fundamental. A bang whose potency is derived from a familiar face. A face that, at one time, eons ago, you studied. You drew with your gaze. All of it hit with a bang back then. All because of the simple, potent, human face. And it hit with a bang that evening, Ben’s face. Just as handsome as I remembered, but now, in this foreign land, seeking my face as if it were the only solid landmass in an expansive sea. Bang! Land-ho.
Nine o’clock on a Friday evening in Shibuya makes for a frenetic scene. The space is filled with sounds, bright lights, and people. Your eyes are pulled in every direction, especially as a tourist. Yet, in an instant, attention can collapse down to the point of a pin, if the salience of what you are looking at is potent enough to override exogenous influence. In this case, at nine o’clock on our Friday evening in Shibuya, Ben was, and he remained salient for the rest of the night. Despite the fact our eyes could have been pulled in every other direction, we our attention was focused on each other, and I could feel time expand such that the present moment achieves a width, a depth, that reminded me of when we first met. We grabbed a late dinner at one of the side-street Yatai stands before heading home. As we walked from Shibuya to Setagaya, the buildings became less dense and less tall, giving space for the deep dark blue night sky to gain prominence and a couple of faint, distant, stars to emerge.
At its worse, tourism is a world-collapsing experience. A country’s identity is distilled to just one monument, its culinary traditions funneled into just one dish, its dynamic history squished into just one, simplistic narrative. At their worst, tourists get angry when their international experiences do not align with pre-conceptions. When, God forbid, the taxi takes a wrong turn, when the GPS doesn’t work, when the strangers at the table next to you dare to strike up a conversation. God forbid reality overtakes ideology. God forbid serendipity wins. I’m being sarcastic, of course. As someone who’s major life events were, in hindsight, the product of serendipity, I hold myself deferential to the logic of the universe, sustaining faith as I walk toward the unknown future. When done right, you’ll never be angry because you’ll never be disappointed. What’s amazing is how this disposition scales outward and upward to generate a logic for interacting with physical space, including cities; that is, un-committed, liberated, drifting toward serendipity.
The student of faith he was, Ben was capable of something similar. Together, we set out in with the focus of a warm zephyr travelling west to east. Our destinations, vague; our speed, amble; the invisible tether we tied between the two us in Melbourne, newly mended and rendered sturdy. Together, and over the course of the next several days, Ben and I drifted our way to and between Tokyo’s multiple tourist sites, taking in what the city had to offer and leaving space for discovery; in the spaces between landmarks as well as in between Ben and me. We were unafraid to drift because, ultimately, we had faith we’d discover urban experiences that would supersede anything either of us could curate through our own brute planning. The same was true for between Ben and me; through the mentality of drifting, and with faith, we would discover emotional experiences that would supersede anything either of us could pre-determine.
Meiji Park, the Imperial Palace, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, the Golden Gai, were all east of Setagaya. One day, we set out to visit Harajuku, one of the city’s main cultural neighbourhoods and a place where Tokyo’s youth congregate. The kids in Harajuku are known for dressing up like their favourite anime character and the stakes are high to execute it well. Crowds of kids jeer and taunt poorly executed costumers, while those that serve the highest fidelity are rewarded by internet posts and reposts, rendering them local celebrities, even if for just a day. Those that do not directly participate in the live action role playing are no fashion slouches, either. Young Tokyoites walk past in slim designer suits, tailored coats, and collarless cotton shirts that communicate an understated confidence. Omotesando Street is filled with luxury stores – Dior, Miu Miu, Channel – designed by the world’s top architects to look like glistening gemstones that play light tricks on passing pedestrians. And the magic doesn’t stop at Omotesando; Harajuku’s side streets are filled with boutiques, art galleries, and designer stores. Cat Street, for example, is a meandering pedestrian pathway replete with the newest fashions. Everything fits, too. People are healthy in Japan, and their clothes are tightly tailored for a populous that walks often, lives long, and eats a healthy balance of fish and vegetables. Japanese suits, dresses, and shirts may not look flashy, but they will be cut perfectly from the best materials. In this way, Japanese luxury is more focused on quality than American ostentatiousness. It’s a type of kind of luxury that feels earned.
Cat Street’s flair gave Ben and I much to look at as we drifted toward Imperial Park, our destination for that day. Each of us would be periodically pulled by our own curiosities into one of the many artisanal shops. We would jut in and out of human-scale holes-in-the-wall, like prairie dogs testing dugouts on a grassy knoll. But despite our respective, independent, small-scale sojourns, an invisible tether connected us together, pulling snug when distances surpassed a certain threshold, prompting mini scout missions. Like some sort of waltz, I remember thinking. Likely the most at ease I had ever felt with another person.
Like most of Japan’s Imperial Palaces, Tokyo’s Imperial Palace – home of Japan’s Imperial Family – is surrounded by a public park. For as much land is sequestered and labeled “private” by the family, the same amount is donated back to the public. Between a moat and the palace wall, there is a lengthy stretch of green space, with prim trimming and meandering paths that signalled an opportunity for Ben and I to slow down during our cross-city drift and find some shade beneath a blooming cherry blossoms. On this weekday afternoon, young mothers with their small children met and served onigiri and mochi lunches on top of elegant furoshikis, creating nearly bucolic scenes that, from a wide vantage, juxtaposed sharply against the surrounding noise and tangle and the urban metropolis. Here, in this green oasis beneath the cherry blossoms, Ben and I took a rest. In this moment, in this bucolic space, and for the first time since we arrived, we reckoned with how foreign, how truly alien, we were to Tokyo. The truth was we knew nobody, we couldn’t speak the language, and if anything happened to either of us – a lost passport, a medical emergency, a mugging – we’d have a nightmare of time trying to sort it out. Yes, Japanese culture is fundamentally hospitable, but ultimately introverted which, at times, folds into an overt hostility toward foreigners. In this unfamiliar metropolis, two out of 41 million, Ben and I needed each other. I could feel the invisible tether pull tighter.
What if it were true for life, too? What if, as gay men, we were foreigners no matter where we were? Even in our home cities. Even in our families. It’s not an inaccurate description. As young gay people first discovering our identities, our sense of isolation is so profound, so mind-altering, it fundamentally restructures our ability to hold relationships with other people for the rest of our lives. We become forever outsiders. That is, until we find each other. When it’s a match, two gay men meeting can feel like two meteors colliding. Even though Ben and I grew up on opposite sides of the earth, our shared experiences of social isolation were immediately recognizable. We could see the metaphorical life-rafts we built for ourselves, on our own, without the help of anyone else. For once, finally, we found someone to build with. We found companionship.
“It’s nice to see you again”. Ben said to me. His body began to release into a soft fold as he placed his head on my shoulder. I could tell the social benefits of companionship were greatly needed for both of us.
Beneath the cherry blossoms, he began to tell me about his life back in Australia, which was far from perfect. His father and the woman he remarried after Ben’s mother passed were still obstinately homophobic – a consequence of their cultural conditioning. Ben grew up in the Baptist Church of Australia, and his dad and stepmom still regularly attended. It was in many ways an idyllic community to grow up in, Ben told me. He received a kind of unconditional love most Western adolescents do not. As soon as the kids enter the Church’s pre-school programs, they are drilled the idea that God loves and cares for them, no matter what. Ben excelled in these spaces. From preschool until late adolescents, he was the star of all manner of church activities; first in line at choir practice, campaigning to feed to homeless, staring as baby Jesus in the Nativity play. As a sensitive and intelligent boy, he had, for once, a competitive advantage against his peers. Ben was beloved by all.
That is, up until he wasn’t. Australia in the 1990s was a profoundly homophobic place. It took Tasmania until 1997 to decriminalize homosexuality. In 1992 a man was acquitted of murder after killing a gay man simply by alleging that the gay man made a sexual advance towards him. In the media, homophobic opinions were not coded but overt. Political and public rhetoric was shamelessly dehumanizing. At the Baptist Church – the centre of Ben’s social universe – ministers spoke of deviants destined for eternal hellfire. For much of this time, Ben was too young to understand who they were talking about. Eventually, though, at around the time of his own sexual development, he came to realize they were talking about him.
At around 12 years old, at a time when the love and support of your family and friends is supposed to feel unbreakable, everything about Ben’s world started to crumble. It turned out, there were conditions to God’s love. And Ben, by virtue of his existence, had failed to meet those conditions. For years, he had engaged with his Baptist peers without fear or reservation, and with full confidence they loved and supported him. Now though, as if overnight, the invisible tethers that bound Ben to his to his friends, to his family, even to his God, were broken.
“A tidal wave of shame.” Ben described it to me.
I remember thinking that there are only a few other social conditions that operate with the same physics. When a spouse discloses an affair. When the person you thought was your father reveals the relation is not biological. When a terminal cancer diagnosis is received. Each one requires an instantaneous and complete re-organization of every meaningful relation in your mind. Everything changes. At around 12 years old, everything around Ben started to crumble. In the darkest hours, one becomes overwhelmed with feelings of despair. Abject societal isolation manifests as physical immobility. A severe depression takes hold, but one that must be kept a secret to avoid an investigation into the causes. Keeping a façade becomes an existential necessity. At such a young age, we are forced to psychologically dissociate. We are forced to partition away our trauma and bury it so deep it leaves no behaviour residue. None whatsoever. It is our first hit job.
That’s not to say daily life remains unaffected. In our waking hours, we expend ourselves ensuring no one knows about our crime. To be the smartest, the funniest, the hottest, the best dressed, etc., is our armour against interrogation. If those don’t work, cruelty – the kind that wounds – will do. Even low-grade, inter-personal fascism, the kind that suffocates all social relations, gets deployed. We feel like forever criminals trying to cover their tracks. These psychological adaptations can, and do, become pathological.
As a Christian, cruelty couldn’t be a life ethic. No, Ben had to be moral. But Christianity gave Ben another adaptation to adopt. To save himself, he had to become a martyr. Lucky for him, every church loves a martyr. Ben found plenty of opportunities to overextend himself on every hyper-moralistic endeavour available in his Baptist community. For several years in fact, Ben lived in an inner-city missionary to Melbourne’s homeless population. Every day, he would wake up, have his breakfast, study the bible, then set out for a day of missionary work. He would visit various encampments throughout the city, offering meals, resources, and light-grade proselytizing to the down-trodden. As helpful as it was for these individuals to receive care and compassion, Ben was the one experiencing the true healing. In comparison to the hardships experienced by Melbourne’s homeless, Ben’s personal plights appeared small and trivial. He could ignore them by focusing on the pain of others. More than that, in the eyes of his father, as well as in the eyes of his God, Ben was doing the Good Work; work that would set him apart – ahead – of his peers. Add the fact that Ben would cap his days off with several hours spent studying for his nursing degree, and you have what others would describe as a well-adjusted young Christian man.
But it was not real. And Ben knew it. As hard as he would try – and he tried with every ounce of energy he could – Ben’s emotions would bubble to the surface. He was constantly surrounded by his church peers – people who he said he loved and who said they loved him – but these interactions never fully fulfilled him. As a smart boy, he learnt what words to say, what emotions to mirror, what concern to feign to give the impression of being just like everyone else. But it was not real. And Ben knew it. Every now and then, often alone at night, Ben could feel the same fear he felt when he was 12, when that tidal wave of shame overtook him. As hard as he tried, despite his martyrdom, Ben knew he was still gay. He knew he had not changed. Perhaps he would never. And that terrified him.
The thing about martyrdom is that someone must die. Ben finally found his target: himself. Or at least the part he hated. The gay part. He decided to take drastic measures and, with the help of his father, signed up for conversion therapy. In this pseudo-scientific practice, self-professed “therapists” would conjecture made up narratives about the causes and consequences of homosexuality, counseling participants that the only sexual desires they should ever feel is toward the opposite sex. Like his initial exposure to conceptualizations of homosexuality in the Baptist church, these descriptions were always grounded in shameless homophobic tropes. On top of that, participants would be forced it engage in “workshops” to “perform” heterosexuality, like male bonding sessions or describing the perfect female partner. They cited trauma – the death of his mother – as the cause of Ben’s same-sex desires. It sounds like torture, and some of it was, but the truth is that above all else the program was experienced as quintessential cringe, bordering on comical. There was just such a farce about all of it; the way they obsessed about an entire demographic of people they had never met, the way they oscillated between scientific “facts” and biblical scripture, the half-baked group activities that ignored all form of personal boundaries. It was all so cringe. Ben was taking notice.
Humans are built for connection. We crave it like we crave water. But not with anyone; ideally, with those that share similar perspectives, experiences, and drives. It’s natural for young mothers to gather to discuss the best breast-feeding techniques; it’s normal for elder men to meet to debate stock trades. But where in a world that actively suppresses the expression of gay identity could a gay 21-year-old with a repressed but burgeoning sexuality go to liberate his latent desires? Certainly, nowhere Ben’s peers were going. But Ben was clever and had discovered through hushed conversations about parts of the city where “those people” hung out. In back-alley dives on the outskirts of the CBD, in the interstitial spaces between working class neighbourhoods like Fitzroy and Collingwood, Ben had heard of spaces – bars – where gay people would go. Of course, Ben’s upbringing had taught him that being a patron of these spaces was strictly forbidden. To rationalize his presence, Ben would tell himself that this community – the gay community – needed his saving. They needed God, and he could habitat these spaces if all he was doing was researching its denizens. This rational was, of course, patently absurd. At the end of the day, Ben was as gay as anyone else in those spaces. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Ben felt different than the other gays. Even if it was all in his mind.
What Ben, and other repressed homosexuals of that era, didn’t realize is that gay culture is specifically designed to erode the artificial barriers gay men build for themselves in their minds. Not through the logic of verbal argument, but rather, through the logic of the body. Through the rises and falls of emotional swells. Through visual bursts of colour and strobe light. Through the beat of the heart that, when synched to the beat of a dance track, can finally keep a confident pace. For those of us who had, up until that point, gave too much head to the thoughts in our mind, always repressing and never truly trusting our own bodies, like a dam bursting from decades of built-up pressure. Ben was swept up. Within the span of only a couple of visits to the gay bars, his role shifted from observer to participant.
But just as the night inevitably turns today, Ben too had to turn himself back into his well-adjusted young Christian man identity and show up for his daytime commitments. Many of us party on the weekends and work during the week, but few of us have such a direct conflict between the personas we embody at each time point. At night, Ben’s life was filled with drag queens, pop divas, new friends, and glitter cannons. During the day, he was surrounded by people who, without hesitation, would tell you that gay people were destined for hell, that there is no such thing as gay “love”, and that, if it were to be approved, same-sex marriage would lead to the demise of society. Worse still, until only recently, Ben believed these things himself. He would have argued on behalf of any of these positions. His newfound night-time life, which included a new cast of friends, was the first time he had confronted the possibility that gay people were, in fact, human, just like everyone else. That God’s love shone down on everyone, regardless of who they loved. It even shone down on Ben.
With a newfound conviction, Ben began to test the boundaries of the beliefs of his daytime peers, saying simple things like “Gay people are God’s children too” or “Love is something to be cherished, not judged” and listen closely to reactions. Each time, he’d gauge whether the replies expressed compassion or condemnation. Almost every time, unfortunately, his statements would be met by condemnation. It made for a destabilizing experience. On the one hand, during the nighttime, Ben was building a whole new world for himself filled with positive interactions with other gay men. On the other hand, during the daytime, he was steeped in an obstinately homophobic culture that constantly pressed him – overtly and passively – to live a heterosexual life. It felt as though these two landmasses were travelling in opposite directions.
But it was too soon to choose which landmass to live one. It was the early 2000s in Australia, and the gay community had just barely survived the AIDS crisis. Outcomes for gay men were still dismal in comparison to their heterosexual peers. Ben couldn’t commit to this potential future and tried with all his might to keep two feet in each world. This meant doubling down on his double life, where weekends were spent socializing with his new gay friends and weekdays were spent doing inner-city Baptist missionary work. The steady tick of the clock on the wall would imply that engaging in either of these two activities was just a matter of registering the time of day. But the truth was, they could not be more ideologically district. Ben could feel a gulf emerge between his two identities. The foundation beneath his feet began to split in two. And so began his great fall.
There is a small but consequential difference between the martyr and the hero. Heroes are canonized in history. Their stories centre around overcoming a great challenge, and, through ethics of hard work, perseverance, courage, and conviction, heroes eventually succeed. The stories of martyrs also centre around a great challenge, but the key difference is the outcome; where heroes win, martyrs fail. Ben always thought of himself as more of a martyr than a hero. The possibility of complete social rejection always haunted him. Now, torn between two worlds and without a clear path forward, the time had come, he reasoned, to enact what he felt was always destiny.
It was at that time that Ben’s weekend nights became darker. The large majority of the friends he made in Melbourne’s gay bars were there to dance, have fun, and meet new people. Others, however, had other motivations. Alcohol and other substances, coupled with the rush of dance music and the potential for sex, were forms of therapy that, when offered without conditions, could easily be abused. For some, the need for dopamine surpassed a momentary rush; it was existential. It wasn’t just about “feeling good”; it was about stopping their worlds from collapsing. Ben fell prey. The gay nightlife, which was once the cure for Ben’s isolation, was becoming the cause of it.
This was exactly the evidence Ben’s father was looking for. He had caught wind that Ben was spending more nights out, slacking at his therapy program, and skipping Sunday morning church. As a registered psychiatrist, he was trained to explore the deepest depth of the human psyche and rut out maladaptive thinking patterns. Noticing a change in behaviour, he set out to do the same to his son, and he had a hunch of the root cause – same-sex attraction – which, still being a Baptist, he believed had to be banished from Ben’s psyche. What followed was a humiliating series of confrontations between Ben and his father that had been years in the making. From Ben’s father’s perspective, this was a last-ditch effort to excise a rapidly metathesizing personality flaw. From Ben’s perspective, they were brutal interrogation where Ben’s humanity was dangled out in front of him, critiqued and conjectured using the dehumanizing terminology of “objective” psychiatric science. Ben was to be analyzed, but never believed.
It was a profoundly traumatic time, and no one felt the pain more than Ben. He grew despondent upon realizing he would never live up to his father’s – or his father’s God’s – standards. Ben lost his footing. He became adrift. Neither in the Christian world nor the gay one. It was a third world. One without form. Without structure. Total loss. Antediluvian. Here, in this formless space, Ben reasoned that if he was truly the martyr he set out to be, perhaps now was his time to die.
There was a time when Tokyo was nothing but rubble. A formless space where haunted bodies searched for humanity in the shadow of sheer destruction. On the night of March 9th, 1945, the American Army conducted what is still the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. 41 square kilometres of central Tokyo were destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless. 334 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs, most of which were incendiary napalm cluster bombs that punched through the thin roofing material of the wooden, Japanese architecture, igniting upon impacting the ground and exploding out a jet of flaming napalm globs. Tokyo’s fire defenses were instantly overwhelmed. The Americans unloaded their bombs in a large X pattern centred in Tokyo’s densely populated working-class district that, coupled with prevailing wind gusts, quickly conflagrated into a full-blown firestorm spanning a quarter of all of Tokyo. Post-war analysis has unanimously determined the raid was a war crime due to its targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life. It wasn’t just on par with the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, by all metrics it was worse. Along with the other atrocities committed in that era, the firebombing of Tokyo represented a dissociation from all manner of ethical guidance, a total collapse of collective meaning, and a global drift from a shared humanity.
Today, the scars of Tokyo’s traumatic past are barely visible on the surface. A walk through the Koto and Chūō wards – ground zero of the bombing campaigns – leaves a positive, albeit somewhat sterile, impression. The buildings look new, there is a healthy mix of residential and commercial, and the sidewalks are full of people. Structurally, though, the city is different here. In Koto and Chūō, the streets form a tight grid does not bend in deference to pre-existing parks, palaces, or temples. There simply aren’t as many out in this part of the city compared to the rest of Tokyo. What might be registered as a coincidence to most observers, is in fact a direct consequence of the firebombing that destroyed every piece of historic architecture in the area. The grid, too, is a product of the post-war rebuild. At that time, urban individuation was traded for efficiency. Like Shibuya and Setagaya, Koto and Chūō once had meandering, winding, human-scale streets derived from a pre-automotive past. But not anymore. Not after what happened. Not after the devastating loss of civilian life. Not after the humility of surrender. What was once a waltz is now had to be a military march. But everyone knows, all forms of fascism – including fascism expressed in the urban form – are not about the future. They are about the past. They are about a fear of the past – a deeply rooted, pervasive, fear of repeating the past. Fascism’s manic rigour is always a coverup attempt of shameful secrets. But as history invariably proves, it is a coverup attempt that always fails.
Ben’s cover up was failing, too. As hard as he tried, he could not evade the discerning judgmentalism of his Baptist psychiatrist father. It left him feeling like he had no future worth living for. Completely adrift, Ben set out for Tasmania with a few close friends. Here, on the edge of world, he taunted God, goading to see his face, begging for guidance. A or B, which was it? Straight or gay, who was he meant to be? A or B?
“Maybe it’s X.” God replied.
At least the God in Ben’s mind. Maybe it’s X, he said. Maybe it doesn’t have to one way or the other. Maybe it is undefined. And maybe that’s enough. From that day, on the edge of the world, Ben made the promise to himself that he would start to love who he was. He promised he would fall in love with himself completely.
It had been several days since Ben told me his story beneath the cherry blossom tree in Imperial Park. Since then, we had continued our drift through Tokyo, seeing many sights along the way. This day, though, we decided to separate to pursue our individual interests. He went shopping for friends. I went to an art gallery. For the most part, Tokyo’s weather in the spring is humid and pleasant, but every couple of days, and usually over the span of a few short hours, the moist air condenses to form low-lying thick, dark clouds that burst open an create massive, afternoon downpours. We had planned to meet at a coffee shop near our rental, but he was running late. He had been out all day using his phone to maneuver his way to different shops throughout the city and his battery was about to die. He knew the general direction of where to walk, but being unable to read the Kanji storefront signs, he needed to be able to find me right away from the street. I set from the café and walked in his direction. Afternoon commuters scurried down the street in search of shelter as the rain collapse all around. It would be impossible, you would think, to find one person amidst this chaos. To register a melody from an urban cacophony.
Unless it’s the face of someone you deeply care for. That potent human face. If the affection is true, it will always hit with a bang. Today was our test. As throngs of Tokyoites whizzed by in the pouring rain, Ben and I caught eyes in the crowd. I could tell he was seeking my face as if it were the only solid landmass in a sea of strangers. The tensing of muscles around his eyes communicated concern, which swiftly released into relief after catching sight of me. I saw it. I could decipher his meaning. And he allowed me to see it. Surrounded by a city with a population greater than that of either country Ben or I come from, we could see each other.
I came to Tokyo to drift. I came to drift the city in search of new meaning. To release myself from the confines of rationality and to reconnect with my authentic drives. When I leave it all behind, then, only then, I see the city. I see him completely.
Author and Ben (2017). Taken by author.