Thursday, October 11, 2012  Won't Miss #495 - "worn" = "dirty"
Yes, this is a real place in Tokyo (in Hamadayama). I don't know
what it was all about, but the elaborate garbage placement
nearly made it a work of art.   I have a real ambivalence about
the way things worked in Tokyo in terms of the constant renewal
and the waste associated with it versus the pristine sense of
things being clean and new. Since coming back to America, I have
been struck by how profoundly grubby things seem at times, even
when they are actually technically "clean". Stores, even large,
modern ones, in particular can sometimes shock me with the wear
and tear on their structures which make them appear rundown. In
Tokyo, customers generally felt uncomfortable with any sort of
visible wear such as cracks, chips in paint, age-based
yellowing. Anything that resembled age-related loss of quality
was generally kept to a bare minimum. Most things felt pretty
fresh and relatively new, if not actually "new". It didn't hurt
that cleaning was