Fifteen years ago, on May 22, a programmer spent a lavish 10,000 bitcoins for a single pizza, simply to fill his stomach. The story became legend. Fifteen years later, today, caught in the tide of pedestrians in Shibuya and wavering over what to eat for dinner, I caught sight of a small pizza shop by the street and slipped inside with a sense of homage.
I chose a seat toward the back. Along an entire row of tables, I was the only customer. To my left was a round mirror; to my right, another round mirror. With no other diners to interrupt the view, the confined space suddenly multiplied into infinite versions of myself, making the flood of people outside feel thin, almost insubstantial. They all seemed to look at me at once, and in that instant I felt an overwhelming loneliness. Tokyo, too, became profoundly lonely in that moment.
I.
Back in high school, whenever I ate instant noodles, I would always put on an episode of Solitary Gourmet. Somehow, that made the bowl of Master Kong taste three degrees better. Even then, I imagined my future self wandering alone through Tokyo, eating alone. I hadn’t expected that moment to arrive so soon.
This was already my third day roaming Tokyo by myself.
I looked down at what I had ordered and found myself in an awkward spot. Restaurants in Tokyo all seem to hide a kind of inscrutable mind game: if the menu is only in Japanese, the portions are probably small; if there’s a separate English menu, the portions tend to be larger; but if Japanese dominates, with English tucked underneath in small print, then it becomes impossible to judge. I had no choice but to glance at the dishes on nearby tables to estimate portion sizes—unfortunately, there were no other customers here to serve as reference.
With a mindset of “better too much than too little,” I ordered a seafood risotto and a thin-crust pizza. As expected, it turned out to be a bit too much.
II.
I originally planned to write something like, “In terms of xx, Tokyo is much better than New York,” and then list the relative merits of big cities. Once I began, I realized the premise didn’t hold. In fact, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything New York did uniquely well. If I had to force one out, it would be that Tokyoites are truly terrible at English—by comparison, New Yorkers speak English quite well. But on second thought, that might just be my own problem.
Next time, I should switch the competitor to London or Paris.
III.
The flight from Atlanta to Tokyo was violently turbulent, like riding a bus older than the road it was driving on, a road built half a century ago. To make matters worse, my seat was in the last few rows of the plane, doubling the thrill.
To my left sat a pair of babies—or rather, something between babies and children, clearly past the mirror stage—who were unprecedentedly loud. They cried so relentlessly that even the emotional-support dog sitting diagonally in front of me grew visibly irritated. Thankfully, it had professional discipline and didn’t bark back.
In short, the two misfortunes one can encounter on a flight both happened at once.
I’ve always had a mild fear of flying: I’m afraid of turbulence, especially the roller-coaster-like plunges and climbs. Even though such moments are relatively rare and usually brief, the randomness of their inevitability keeps my nerves perpetually taut. As a result, even when lying flat, I can’t sleep at 30,000 feet—a flaw that has since deprived me of the occasional upgrade to business class by my parents. This fear of weightlessness hangs over me whenever I am a passenger, only lifting once the plane touches down.
IV.
After a long fifteen hours, landing freed me—temporarily—from one layer of fear. Almost immediately, however, I fell into another, similar in scent but different in intensity. Unlike the sharp fear of flight, this one carried something ancient, drifting faintly through the air. If not for a longing for solid ground, it might not have climbed into one’s heart at all.
For Japan, that random inevitability is the earthquake.
I have always believed it is this inevitability buried within the earth that has shaped the Japanese national character: the pursuit of order, obedience to nature, and a deeply embedded tendency toward self-destruction.
V.
During these days in Tokyo, I kept thinking about earthquakes. I studied the emergency evacuation maps on doors again and again.
I often dream of three things: elevators, airplanes, and storms. Whenever a storm appears in my dreams, it is always accompanied by an earthquake. Buildings collapse before they can even hit the ground, only to be swept away by the storm.
But dreams run backward. Perhaps the earthquake comes first, shaking buildings down, and then the storm arrives to tidy everything away, leaving behind a natural stillness. That seems more logical.
VI.
An earthquake is an absolutely forceful phenomenon. Even though this nation, living atop seismic belts and active volcanoes, has long understood that fact, it still chooses Mount Fuji as its national symbol. Rather than resisting an irresistible natural power, they choose to worship it, submit to it, even absorb it as part of themselves—binding their spirit to Fuji and constructing a grand spiritual image of the self.
Even so, they have never neglected their defenses against nature. Human instinct drives them to guard against it, to study it, and thus to negate nature’s one-sided capacity for destruction. They become sensitive, cautious, afraid that this fused subjectivity might be shattered. So they suppress individual impulses in pursuit of order, turning the individual into a morally burdened unit that can be sacrificed for the collective.
At the same time, pessimism germinates from the constant possibility of annihilation, giving rise to figures like Mishima and Dazai—who contemplated, discussed, and even practiced intentions of destruction, especially suicide.
VII.
Personally, I believe that the destruction of beauty cannot transcend beauty itself. Especially when the self is placed in the position of “beauty,” destruction becomes a paradox—like a computer attempting to shut itself down.
VIII.
Are there simply too many buildings by Tadao Ando in Tokyo? It feels as though I see his work everywhere.
Even though Ando’s architectural philosophy emphasizes dialogue with surrounding nature—aligning with the Japanese ideal of the human–nature relationship—when I touch the familiar exposed concrete bricks, I sense a spirit of self-protection and resistance. As I wrote earlier, coexisting with nature is the ideal; from the outside, his buildings do harmonize with their environment. Yet armoring oneself with stone, casting geometric shields in cold, restrained concrete, is also clearly intentional.
This architectural poetry, woven from the tension between “ideal” and “reality,” is my personal reading of Ando.
IX.
Tokyo’s subway weighs heavily on me. Everyone seems layered with shadows of responsibility, while the omnipresent advertisements gleam so brightly they make it hard to keep one’s eyes open. Individuals in such a materially advanced society truly know how to “live”: they own more bookmarks, stationery, cosmetics—and can afford them. Even so, when they appear as a collective, the “life” in each person feels diminished, leaving only a stark, exposed “survival.”
X.
If we can only confirm someone’s presence by seeing their body, then when a person coats themselves in makeup, covering every exposed piece of flesh—甚至 hiding the eyes behind colored contacts—Tokyo’s streets must be full of ghosts, wandering in a state of absence.
XI.
On my second day in Tokyo, I took the subway from Omotesando back to my hotel. Along the way, the train encountered a “personal injury incident.” Security staff ran toward the front of the carriage with steel poles, shouting things I couldn’t understand—apparently some kind of assault or murder had occurred.
There were hardly any standing passengers; most people were seated. After hearing the guards, they showed a brief flicker of surprise, then returned to their original state. The entire carriage looked like two neat rows of tombstones—orderly and silent.
I was the most panicked person there. Even while keeping my composure, my mind raced: if a violent incident had happened ahead and security was mobilizing, escaping would be the best option. Yet the people on either side of me remained utterly calm, making me doubt whether I had misunderstood. If nothing serious was happening, my escape would look ridiculous.
If something truly serious had occurred and everyone could still behave like this, two possibilities emerged:
From childhood they had been desensitized with an education of “order first, do not panic,” suppressing emotion.
Injuries and deaths in Tokyo’s transit system are so common that daily commuters have grown numb.
Caught in this unresolved mental game, I ultimately chose to leave the train at a station I would likely never visit again, and walked all the way back to my hotel.
XII.
Tokyo permits loneliness. The more inclusive a city is, the more it allows individuals to be lonely. In this respect, New York is similar. One can do almost anything alone, as long as one’s wallet allows it.
Tokyo’s temperament, however, is more reclusive. Those within groups—at work, in schools, within institutional structures—are more outwardly warm yet restrained. This false intensity makes the moments of nighttime solitude, when one can finally breathe, especially precious and intoxicating. To compensate for this immense demand for solitude, Tokyo naturally produces countless spaces for a person to empty out, rest, and think. Filling café seats, capsule hotels, and internet café booths are the lonely—the sufferers, the enjoyers, the addicts.
XIII.
The Mori Art Museum’s exhibitions are wildly uneven. I can’t understand how works at the level of undergraduate graduation shows make it inside.
Nor do I understand the commercial operations of art. Please don’t let me fall into that contemptuous line of thinking that “the commercialization of art is just for money laundering.”
XIV.
I’ve always felt that the E or I in MBTI tests distinguishes people by their attitude toward loneliness. Those who believe loneliness must be endured are Es; those who feel loneliness need not be endured—who even find it pleasurable—are Is.
By this logic, Tokyo is a very I city. Everyone is soaking in the crater of loneliness, yet appears perfectly content. (I’ve heard Tokyoites bathe at extremely high temperatures—perhaps due to some kind of competitive mindset? One can only say every country has its own shanghai uncle.)
Tokyo is enormous. Its museums, galleries, bookstores—one could never finish exploring them through tourism alone. Its vastness is not just spatial or demographic, but lies in the constant circulation and renewal of matter and information: new exhibitions, new music, new clothes, new games. It is a city larger than its surface, a city in perpetual change, a city one can’t escape from—a city that invites you to willingly fall into solitude.
XV.
A friend, C, recently entered a new personal realm—a “meta-philosophical” realm, at least according to him. He says that while reading is important, the real challenge is internalizing philosophy: starting from one’s own thinking to touch the most abstract concepts, no longer just thinking about problem x or y—Kant’s texts, Foucault’s texts—but reflecting on meta-questions such as what “thinking” is, what a “problem” is. Like a lonely soul floating and struggling in a colorless mind. The external body could just as well be a panda or a seal—it wouldn’t matter.
That must be what “realm” means. I don’t really understand it.
XVI.
Perhaps my learning is still shallow. When it comes to grasping deeper issues and concepts, I feel sluggish. Even if I can follow the logic from A to B, I can never touch the existence of A and B through abstraction alone. I always need concrete personal experience to digest the unruly philosophy in my stomach.
Just as shaking helps solids dissolve into liquids, perhaps entering complex environments and engaging in more intense physical motion helps digest the metaphysics in one’s brain. In the crowds of Shibuya, my body constantly collided with others, and I suddenly realized that Heidegger’s Verfallen—“fallenness”—is not an abstract concept, but an intensely real everyday condition. People rush through the rhythms of the city with no time for self-reflection; Dasein sinks into the crowd.
When loneliness arrives and the noise recedes, a certain Angst quietly emerges—a groundless awakening.
In the infinite versions of myself reflected in the mirrors to my left and right, we were thinking the same thing. My existence abruptly leapt out from the background of the world. From then on, loneliness was fixed there forever—my loneliness, and Tokyo’s loneliness.
XVII.
If the seismic belt is a crumbling wall, then those who live in Tokyo are like solitary gentlemen standing beneath it. They bear not only external, fatal threats, but also the ease with which the individual, through loneliness, slips out of the warm, comfortable state of fallenness.
And so the city becomes oppressive. It makes me want to leave quickly—perhaps not to return for a very long time.
