I have been to Tenno a few times but only now did I notice that this town is graced with a rather high number of mirrors. Maybe this is a good way to show you bits and pieces of Japanese suburban (suburbian?) streets.
This one was strangely (nicely) blue, but you can still see the convenience store.
Every mirror needs its Narcissus :-)
I am not sure how long those electoral posters have been there and for how many elections. It seems to me that the same old posters are always hanging on the walls and are never put down or replaced. But that is probably just my (wrong) impression.
See what you want to see... :-)
Pinboard.
The speedway running just behind that roof. The town continues on the other side of it.
I don't know what happened there. Old age?
Narcissus had to come back, of course.
The railway crossing gate.
Playing...
And I leave you here with this view of the bay of Hiroshima and its oyster racks. I hope you enjoyed the promenade...
They're like so many eyes. Gives me the shivers (in a good way).
ReplyDeleteI love the overload of signs and wires in the first railway crossing shot.
Is this a government thing or are people throwing these mirrors up themselves?
Thank you Wooden Boy! I'm glad you found this mirror post. Yesterday after posting this I did my usual tour of the blogs and found your poem about the driver's mirror. I thought oh, what a nice coincidence! But I'm to shy to post a link to my own blog, so thank you for dropping in, I really appreciate. Japan is a VERY over-wired country. It's wires wherever you look. I always saw a lot of poetry in this nation wide ugliness. The mirrors, hmmm... I think the large ones are official government things, but the small ones on the fences sure look homemade.
ReplyDeleteThat's amazing, all those anamorphic teardrop fisheye worlds. Around some corner, someone will always be watching. This must be the future. People putting these things up on their own initiative, that would be colluding with the inevitable, perhaps, but still -- the Orwell idea that Big Brother is always watching seems to have been diluted to a more democratic level: everyone is Big Brother!
ReplyDeleteStill I don't know that it's as bad as the UK scheme of having everyone in every public space on camera all the time. We're getting that more and more here too now. On the first night after the nasty Boston events, the work crews were busy in the underground station downtown, installing a new flotilla of everpresent mechanical eyeballs. Some day people will ask, Where has privacy gone? And some will reply -- Oh, privacy, bad idea that was, much too dangerous!
Mechanical eyeballs and wires, what a nice landscape we are living in. Funny you should mention privacy, Tom. Privacy was a running joke back at the farm. Every time we had been out for a little while, on our way home we would systematically say oh we need priiiiivacy (with very elongated i). It's not that we had been to extremely crowded places or that we felt observed by mechanical or human eyes, but we knew that privacy is important. Your "where has privacy gone" would make the girls laugh and smile because that what exactly the spirit. When I left, at the airport I got singled out for full body scan (of course a much less invasive kind of body mapping than those of the night of the four scans), and we all thought the same thing at the same time: they are intruding my priiiiiivacy!! How dare they!
ReplyDelete