One City, Two Faces: Tsukiji Market

Posted on urbanphoto.net

Sushi Bar at Tsukiji Market, Tokyo

The hardest thing for me as a kid growing up in the vastness of suburban Tokyo was to imagine a place different from my own—I was merely one amongst the tens of millions who lived on lands far from the city centre and dominated by the postwar glass-and-concrete aesthetic, and who, via Tokyo’s impeccably efficient train system, poured into the city’s downtown (an unfamiliar and decidedly North American concept), itself a vague place to which the usual definition—anywhere within the famed Yamanote loop line—does no justice.

Life was and still is organized around single train lines: you take it to work, to shops, to the dentist’s etc. Patterns of life literally do not intersect, and one’s world at times becomes a partial reality, composed of the landscape along the morning train ride and people (often the same ones) you bump into on the train platforms and around the train stations.

Which explains why I’d been to many of the fabled sites of Tokyo for only so lamentably few times, and to some never at all; a fact, nevertheless, a sensible Japanese person would take as a matter of course. Take Tsukiji Market (so highly regarded by Lonely Planet) for example—why would a middle-class college-going kid travel to a place for fish mongers and restaurant buyers?

I went regardless, armed with a camera, an academic, collegiate curiosity, and a copy of Lonely Planet which simultaneously identified me as a gaijin and exempted me from Japanese sensibilities.

“Tsukiji” has had a relative short run as a wholesale market (it began in the 1930s), but is, despite its proximity to rarified Ginza, firmly and inextricably linked to the ancient traditions of old Edo’s shitamachi. Aptly translated as the “low city”, shitamachi was the area east of the “high city”, inhabited by lowly trades people–a place of lore that was unglamourous yet prosperous and always uninhibited and vivacious–now survived by only a few touristified pockets, including Tsukiji itself.

Yet it is a functioning market. Huge loads of fish start arriving before dawn, and go through fierce bidding by buyers in a now closed process. By seven o’clock everything has found an owner, and merchants began cutting up their spoils for retail. This is when the market kicks into full gear, as throngs of restaurant buyers arrive for provisions of the day.

Fragments of the shitamachi spirit remain: vendors disregard rules of politeness, hawking their food at the top of their lungs; the fish and meats are displayed with much less scruple than elsewhere; people push past each other uttering insincere apologies; and muddy vegetable-laden golf carts occasionally zip through the crowds, inducing short-lived panic. Also on display are some of the least trendy yet most essential food items in a Japanese kitchen: soy sauce, miso paste, pickled vegetables. The occasional hardware store provides the essentials for a Japanese restaurant.

The bizarre lurks among the mundane.

A stall selling what seems like preserved animals

Outside, crowds of people get their mid-morning fix at street-side noodle shops, many of them literally holes in the wall (although the noodles look fantastic). The business of eating is conducted standing up—all are busy working people, and few seem like tourists.

Standing in this bustle and hustle one can’t help being moved by the place’s warm inclusiveness: to get in on a piece of this place yourself you simply have to show interest in a piece of tuna or slip into one of these dark old sushi joints. This is life at its most humane. The shitamachi vendors are at once loud, unpretentious, welcoming, and show no trace of fin de siecle mawkishness—the market is to be torn down and replaced in 2008, but somehow you know this place will live.

Transit and Myth-Making: One Button at a Time

Posted on urbanphoto.net

The true mark of a city that has shed its pimply adolescent past and gained preeminence is the development of a larger-than-life personality, a personality that is based on layers of collective memories, recollections, human dramas real and ficticious, observed and enacted by oneself. A story of one’s adventures in Camden Town will almost certainly be echoed by someone else’s tale of a London romp; likewise, a hispter’s salacious anecdotes of Saturday night debauchery in the Lower East Side will solicit from others more than just a few recollections of the Lower East Side, and not just from fellow hipsters alone.

It is precisely here that Toronto’s city-building efforts flounder a bit, and the problem is certain even more acute for the multitudes of smaller cities that find themselves on the losing side of the battle for population and talents. Sure, the air might be cleaner, the people friendlier, the street safer, but what does all this matter if your place is constantly mistaken for Anyplace? The occasional appearance in Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje novels aside (and same goes for Montreal and Modeccai Richler/Leonard Cohen), does the Toronto myth mean anything to anyone?

What is particularly vexing about the city government’s shaky sales pitch for Toronto is their obliviousness towards a tremendous resource known as the transit system, which incidentally carries 2.3 million passengers every single day. A cross road in every sense of the word, it is precisely the kind of place where stories take place and memories build upon memories. For a good portions of the 2.3 million passengers, the TTC is an elaborate system of signifiers for their own lives.

For me, the culminative experience of riding the TTC has turned streetcar rides into–excuse the trite metaphor–trips down memory lane: early mornings on the College Streetcar recall brunches on College Street’s brunch row; “501 Queen”–the grandmother of streetcar lines–conjures memories of strolling on beaches near the far east end of that street, and hopping between galleries near the far west end; Dundas Station near Eaton Centre is a sometimes-almost-painful reminder of high school mall rat days.

Pooling such individual recollections can be an almost emotionally overwhelming experience, as a Toronto Star contest proved four years ago. In a competition for the best TTC stories, the entries ranged from the bizzarre (man on subway groping own balls under his newspaper) to the touching (couple met on Chaplin Estate bus, happily married for 25 years). The end result is a curious study of people’s hopes and fears, and the irrefutable proof that Toronto is capable of sustaining its own stories– stories that make outsiders and Toronto’s own inhabitants interested in the city.

Another part of that system of signifiers is physical design, an area in which the TTC has some inherent handicaps to overcome. The functional-utilitarian interiors of subway stations built in the 70s is a farcry from the grandeur of the Moscow system and has few details that make the NYC subway as intriguing as it is; the TTC logo is also not the London Underground Roundel. But as the TTC stations progress in age, the late modernism of their architectural design is gradually beginning to be appreciated. The special TTC font and its retro-modernism offers further opportunities for exploitation.

A shame then that when a TTC merchandise shop finally opened last year at Union Station, people could find nothing other than crappy t-shirts. What happened to the mugs, pens, specialty maps, books, napkins etc. that any tourist can find at Trafalger Square that bear the London Underground roundel?–Yet another case of squandered opportunity and lack of imagination.

Not all is lost though. Thanks to Matt Blackett of Spacing Magazine, these buttons bearing subways station names and the station’s special tile patterns became a runaway success and was dubbed the “civic pride fashion statement of the year”. Add to that the good work that has been done over at Transit Toronto, suddenly the effort doesn’t seem too bad.

A positive feature of the TTC may help also: the transit system in Toronto is not forsaken ground as far as the middle class is concerned, and is instead heavily used by all economic classes. The transit system thus functions more like the kind of civic hub it’s supposed to be, where one meets who he rarely expects to meet–and isn’t this spontaneity the essence of the urban experience?

My Belated Two Cents on the Election

A very long-winded and badly improvised post on urbanphoto.net

"Those seeking thrill from Toronto’s municipal politics are advised to look elsewhere. In a city that at times seems to be in love with the status quo, the re-election of incumbent mayor David Miller is all but certain. But election 2006, which took place this past Monday, is worthwhile if only for what it says about the state of affairs in Toronto.

There was something almost messianic about Miller’s 2003 mayoral bid in a city still reeling from SARS, post-amalgamation fiscal hell, and bad governance. What he brought was a palpable sense of beginning anew and making big plans. Within a year both the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled their starchitectural expansion plans, and urban issues became something they couldn’t have possibly been: hip—with the launching and subsequent success of Spacing magazine being perhaps the most telling sign of changing times.

To be sure, some of the campaign promises were promptly carried through: his first act as a mayor was cancelling the highly contentious bridge link to the Island Airport. Relationship with the city’s creative community also remained cordial, with Miller being a major proponent for a “creative city” and a regular attendee of “cool” parties.
But those enamored with Miller the visionary had good reasons to feel a little disenchanted. On the more strategic issues, little headway seemed to have been made. The TTC still consistent underperforms and, despite a Ridership Growth Strategy, raised fares twice. The much touted “Clean and Beautiful City” initiative also seem to have produced little effect as far as the number of unsightly newspaper boxes were concerned. Most importantly, the city’s neglected waterfront saw little action in the past three years besides incremental and piecemeal improvements; a verdict has yet to be reached for the much-maligned Gardiner Expressway, even though experts warn that, as highrise condos more and more overshadow the area, precious time is running out.

Nobody however doubts Miller’s will power and commitment to the city, and most opinions agree that unless the federal and provincial governments take up their share of Toronto’s money problems and shed their collective antipathy, not much can be done. Thus when Miller’s main competitor Jane Pitfield boldly promised 50km of new subway construction, 250 new police officers and a garbage incinerator, all with local money, she was hardly taken seriously.
The tragedy of the situation is that, in the face of provincial antipathy and fiscal holes, Toronto seems to have comfortably settled into a culture of resignation, taking what it can get and renouncing the rest without complaint, to the point where when the Expo 2015 bid was killed because nobody was willing to pay for it, few even noticed.

Yet all is not lost. That surge of civic optimism with Miller’s election in 2006 may have ebbed but is far from dead. The arts and music scene are thriving, and are increasingly cross-pollinating with the city’s youth urban activism. Once fringe organizations like Spacing and the Toronto Public Space Committee are just beginning to enter the spotlight. Architecture and design is all the buzz on university campuses and in local papers, and the city’s wondrous new cultural edifices (the just-opened opera house for example) all point to that heightened awareness.

Miller may be a “cautious mayor for a cautious city”, but frustrated ambitions aside, much is to be said for his part in ushering in a period in the city where one tangibly feels history been made and changes on the verge of happening. With the city’s first ever charter becoming effective next year, Miller will get more executive power and more room to act; much can still be done about the waterfront and the TTC. Torontonians maybe a resigned and at-times parochial bunch, but they are hardly pessimists. "

What I did want to say but couldn't find a way to incorporate into the article is that I personally find Miller a man of integrity, although sometimes more of a talker than a doer, not entirely through his own fault. He has also done something important that Mel Lastman couldn't have done: he trendified municipal politics and made it a cause celebre for the young 20-something set. Ok I know the public space "scene" is a little in-bred, but at least people are talking about the Gardiner and the waterfront and Regent Park and the TTC, and that's important.

Urban Foibles (1)

While waiting for the lights to turn at College and Spadina today I all of a sudden became aware of the heady smell of burning weed wafting up my nostrils. Normally this wouldn't even warrant a turn of the head, but the smell was so strong that it smelt like someone was smoking up right under my nose--no--it smelt like I was the one smoking up.

Upwind was a curious-looking trio: 60-something 6' giantess with tied-back essex-girl hairdo in a dirty-biege puff jacket, and shrunken-faced 5'5'' hubby with walking cane, happily puffing away, glassy-eyed and dreaming of hippiedom past. Under their noses was a 8-year-old kid, semi-neatly dressed, busy as all 8-year-olds are with Biff or Tommy or whoever their imaginary friend happens to be.

I felt bad for the kid; really I did. I kinda wished for his sake that the old couple had been hippies who sold out as opposed to hippies who never did and ended up having to smoke up at College and Spadina in those dreadful clothes of theirs.

At least the kid will turn out to be interesting, I hope.

To Riverdale: A Photo Tour

Today's weather was a ruthless reminder of the trappings of urban living. Downtown was engulfed in a sceptic mix of hot exhaust fumes, white noise, and the body odour of the living multitudes. I picked my way through Chinatown in the mid-day sun, dodging the chive ladies and street hawkers, trying in vain not to get irritated by the seemingly more-gruesome-by-the-day Falun Gong displays. Garbage cooked in the garbage bins along the street, giving off that familiar sickly sweetness; I was convinced my own legs were slowly cooking too in my jeans.

I ended up in Riverdale Park East, the piece of land east of the Don Valley that was once Toronto's own mini-penal colony. Now as the whole wide universe knows (or Torontonians tend to think), it is a piece of prime park land bordering one of Toronto's most prettified upper-middle class bastions, whose ethos is but a faint echo of its working class past. Didn't Paul Martin buy into neighbourhood in the early 2000's? Or so I thought I had read from Toronto Life a couple of years ago. In any case, the popularity of North Riverdale (north of Gerrard) was such that poor cousin South Riverdale (Toronto's other Chinatown) was able to cash in on the good press. I'm sure more than a few eyebrows were raised this side of Gerrard.

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Riverdale (and the whole East End in general) to me has always had this sort of tangibility to it . I remember way back one year in September when my mother and I went to the Taste of Danforth. A few minor mishaps and a couple of wrong turns later we found ourselves there at the very end of the festivities (and food), stared at the few remaining bereft-looking corn cobs, and decided to just walk around. The walk took us to Broadview Ave. just when the lights were coming on--white, cold, furtive lights beckoning from the million windows of downtown skyscrapers acorss the valley, and on our side, fuzzy yellow beams streaming out of solid, squat-looking Victorians and Edwardians, more grimey-looking than I (a suburbanite then) was used to.

When Toronto takes a momentary respite from its mad dash towards being the ideal place of post-industrial cool, and re-appraises its working-class roots and mythology, this is the place it will turn to. In West Queen West and Little Italy there are hipsters galore and the latest drama in the rise and fall of indie bands, but in Riverdale there are weathered but solid two-storey houses, streetcars clunking by, and tall maple trees instead; nothing but decent lives, quiet industry and Anglo-Saxon rectitude, which, willy-nilly, pervades our history.

Stop, breathe, take stock--we can't and shouldn't walk away from history--and that's why I'm here.

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Not suprisingly, few were out in this hot and muggy day. Riverdale Park East to many downtownites is a forgotten place, and happily so. On my admittedly few trips there I'd never seen more than 10 people on the gigantic grassy slope, though many families did walk by on their way to the pool, a sudden flurry of sandals on concrete, garish swimwear, bronze flesh, white teeth, and childish giggles lingering in the distance.

Tanning on a muggy day like this definitely sounded better on paper. I fidgeted uncomfortably as the farawy cityscape simmered in the toxic brew.


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At five o'clock I packed up my stuff and headed down Broadview, intent on crossing the DVP on Gerrard. Chinatown East at Broadview and Gerrard had the same autumnal air that every dying neighbourhood seems to be infected with; not particularly interested in witnessing squalor and decay, I quickly turned on Gerrard towards the west, across that sad parody of a highway, the Don Valley Parking lot.

At Gerrard and Broadview was the Riverdale Public Library, whose front steps many able-bodied yet unproductive men had for some inexplicable reason taken a liking to. A few Chinese men in their 40s squatted on the garden terrace and gawked at me as I walked by.

Also at that intersection was the Don Jail. While taking this picture an elderly east end-type (read: forlorn-looking) named Floyd approached me. We were very happy to share with each other our views on Walkerton, world religions, and the relative merit of Toronto-area senior homes.

And I did walk past the infamous Regent Park. Beer bottles littered across the lawn was a in-your-face reminder of poverty and the abject failure of 1950s social engineering. The vast expanses of trees did look enticing enough, and vaguely recalled sylvan Stuyvesant Town. But alas, the mis-matched curtains in the windows pulled me back into reality, and reminded me that being poor was not quaint afterall.

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Half an hour of trekking landed me in the heart of hip Cabbagetown. I checked into Jet Fuel, reputedly the best coffee shop in the city. The barista smiled at me until I asked for a drinks menu--"Do we look uncool enough to carry menus?" she seemed to ask. A curt look, and an espresso landed angrily on the counter; we are back in the familiar playground of the young and the hip.

All this Riverdale expedition has managed to do was to deepen my appreciation for my expensive, albeit heavenly, espresso fixes.

THE END