The largest mall on Earth

[ST, Jan 16 (2006)]

Tokyo is a big, huge, gigantic department store, the largest mall on Earth. You think Tokyo and you may easily picture, effortlessly, the symbol of a mechanical stair, or a lift, or an exit sign (the white-depicted person moving sideways through an open door, in the direction a handy arrow indicates, with a dark green colour in the background highlighting the white). Motion, another keyword, is constant in this city. Standing up outside Shibuya station, looking around while slowly rotating around a virtual bodily axis from head to toes, you can see a sublime "perpetuum mobile" - exterior elevators going up and down along the flashy façades of endless department stores, cars and taxis and buses and trains, speeding up and down, moving on roads and railways placed at different planes over the ground, noisy motorbikes rode by trendy teenagers, dozens of bicycles sharing pavement space with hurried pedestrians (either locals or startled foreigners) ringing their bells from behind, all topped by the fantastic show offered by the hordes of people patiently waiting at the various corners of this major city square for the traffic lights to turn green, and then setting up in motion simultaneously from all the various angles as a multifaced humanly wave to join and merge at the center without a break or a splash (there are oblique zebra-crossings at junctions), creating a beautiful instant of orderly chaos, a turbulence of human beings which will dissolve itself after a little while only to happen again a minute later in perfect periodicity. Eddies, vortices, boundary layers, human beings shed downstream.

Challenging common sense, this all happens in seamless harmony.