When the lights changed it became a mad rush to get your shot amidst melee of The Crossing, to pose it up, to hope to be blessed later by the algorithm.
From there we walked into Center Gai. Or, rather, were swept into it, the “main” street of Shibuya, you could say. A long, long time ago, it was said Blade Runner was modeled on Tokyo. (I always felt Hong Kong was the true spiritual model.) But the core of the aesthetic that made Black Runner so alluring was grittiness. Old neon has a quality like film — a grain — that can’t be reproduced with LED lighting. It had been years (maybe ten?) since I walked Center Gai at night, and the blast of light, the kind of GenAI scene before us (“LLM: Please make Future Tokyo”) was so overwhelming all I could do was laugh. LED signage galore, crowds so thick you couldn’t see the street. White kids smoked casually left and right, outside every conbini groups drank chuhais and beers (though now drinking alcohol on the streets in Shibuya is “banned” precisely because of all of this; the death of The Good Thing by dint of scale), harried European parents fed meat buns to their kids in strollers like they were puppies, more people smoked,3 a sprawling Indian family lined up to order ramen from a chain ramen shop with giant English-language kiosks out front, twenty Black folks posed for a group portrait in front of a conveyor belt sushi joint, a Japanese rap group was shooting a video gonzo-style as a dozen tourists filmed, grown men livestreamed speaking Spanish as they jostled past, a woman speaking Portuguese frantically grasped at objects in a shop filled with souvenirs. And mixed within, I suppose, too, there were travelers and locals like us simply there to be eyewitnesses to the circus.
What was different, say, in 2001? Well, there was (ostensibly) local culture. You had the gyaru and gyaruo and the yamamba and other Shibuya oddities straight out of Egg. You could, uh, see the street. Center Gai was never a strictly “local” spot (I mean, this is Shibuya after all), it always had an aura of transience, but there was never not a human-ish-scale to it: kids trickling in from the suburbs looking to find meaning in “the big city.” That sort of stuff. Sure, some tourists, a rouge Gas Panic, but nothing like today, and without the same impulse to consume the very place itself. Because that was the overriding feeling — that everyone around us was there to eat the city, to ingest the city, to take home as much as they could. The purity of intent was breathtaking. Shibuya was there for their pleasure, for them to merge with, mostly digitally. I’m not even sure you can call it selfish when it happens at a mass scale, an existential natural disaster.
In this sense, it was fascinating. Horrifying but also kind of … cool? Hordes, yes, but international in a way Tokyo should aspire to, and with a laudible placidity and straightforwardness to their desires. Nobody was lying. Everyone was authentic in their hunger. Tourists rapacious for overpriced knickknacks and waiting in line for substandard food. Tourists chowing down on white-bread egg sandos, guided by: a billion hours of staring at hand computers, flick-flicking through TikToks and Reels, the Algorithm rewarding the most garish over the most thoughtful, rewarding extremes over silence, travel-fluencers, a full realization of what happens when you scale late-stage capitalism through the lens of omnipresent technology with no guardrails. You get Center Gai in 2025. […]
Center Gai was never that gritty, but today it’s even more risk-free, pure anodyne delight, a sheet of glass reflecting back a million transient people “being in Tokyo.”
Something happened in this last decade the world over — in consumerism and politics and city planning, in education (smartphones in the classroom) and the way we consume news (smartphones everywhere), in how addicted we are to dopamine (smartphones always in hand) and how incapable so many of us are of standing in quiet thought for even a ten-second escalator ride, in how there is an irrepressible and ravenous hunger to reduce complexity (“Vaccines, BAD!”) to the ten-second sound bite — that has infused the masses with a kind of thinking that, to those of us who aren’t eternally online, who haven’t binged Fox News for twenty years or who don’t clock six hours a day of TikTok, feels utterly foreign and unknowable. Not even in the “you’re just getting old” sort of way (though I’m sure there’s that, too), but more cleaving, more incongruous. There’s a growing collection of us who feel eternally gaslit, like the whole of the world has shifted into a configuration that can’t possibly be true, and yet here it is. These are our leaders? These are our policies? This is how we develop a city?
And just to be clear: The reason I feel such a tinge of discomfort by the Center Gai scene is not because I care what travelers do, but because I can’t unsee: the forces driving mass hyper-consumptive tourism are the same ones fomenting fascism, science skepticism, kleptocracy, billionaire veneration, labubus, and entertaining ourselves with little colored bubbles until the very second before we die.