Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building South Observatory
Tetraspace, everyone's favourite travel blogger
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building (the Tochō, for short) is a city hall built how city halls should be. It’s inspired by integrated circuits and gothic cathedrals. It’s taller than its surroundings. It makes sense. The government should have the coolest buildings. Not in a normative way, but in a things-are-aesthetically-right-with-the-world way. I suppose I’m a little bit biased, and often governments go for the cool old-fashioned buildings, rather than the cool new buildings.
I do appreciate how they went for the cool-new-building strategy.
The deck itself is in a nice location.
Ikebukuro does have quite a few highrises surrounding the Sunshine 60 I visited and adored a few days ago, but the Tochō in Nishi-Shinjuku is among a larger district of near-peers. These neighbouring buildings (I think most distinctive in appearance is the Shinjuku Park Tower) are immense from the ground, and you can look down on them from the Tochō while still feeling their scale. Those buildings are filled with rooms, and in those rooms are people, doing things that they think are good ideas to make their lives locally better, and it’s helpful to be close to other people for some goals, so people live and work very close to each other, in vast towers themselves closely packed. You know how Cities are.
Visible also is SKYTREE, of course, in the distance, lit up from the sides as if it were rotating, the bright torch at the peak of Its spire standing above Tokyo like a star in the sky.
Like many decks, the deck isn’t just about observation.
Observation decks are art, and art is communication. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building South Observatory communicates many things, and one of them is this:
“Hey, you! Person from a country with GDP per capita of $6.7 million yen per person per year (~130% of Japan)! Coming to Tokyo and engaging in positive-sum trades with agents in Tokyo is the best allocation of your capital!”
An overt part of the artwork is that there’s a gift store and cafe in the center of the observation deck, selling models of the Tokyo Tower. On the way up, there’s a long line snaking out of the atrium that the elevator leading up is in, and into a neighbouring room. During your long wait in this queue, you walk past a sign with Hello Kitty explaining the Japanese norms which you, as someone who isn’t from Japan, are unfamiliar with.
Tetraspace: I speak so glowingly of Tokyo as part of a long tradition of Japan's ambassador for tourism being a white-haired British catgirl
This is quite touristy, but fortunately falls short of being a managed tourist tunnel Experience.
The covert part of the message is that, from the observation deck, you are surrounded by Tokyo as far as the eye can see. Being in the South Observatory brings me to reflect. I have indeed came to Tokyo, to engage in positive-sum trades with agents in Tokyo. (Did you know that the cost of living is 40% less than in London? And yet it’s the middle of a giant city! It’s cheap! Come to Tokyo and engage in positive-sum trades).
Why am I in Tokyo? What did it take to get me to Tokyo? A lot of things have happened in the past year, that caused to me to be in Tokyo.
I realised that living in my childhood home was subtly pressing on the actions that I found available to me, so I moved to London, and greatly enjoyed being there because as a City it was the Schelling point and many people from the internet went there. I transitioned and changed my name to Tetra. In February I visited San Francisco and there experienced living with friends, not just family or acquaintances, and found this extremely amazing and almost dissociatively disorienting. I didn’t know life could actually be that good. I suspected that life was more than a waiting room for the Singularity and living in the US among friends made this very obvious.
In June I went to San Francisco again, and decided to stay around in the US for three months, because I didn’t have to go back to the UK, and this was better than being in the UK. After that, I continued to have options better than being in the UK.
I’m in Tokyo! Living with someone I like! I go up the observation deck, and in every direction as far as I can see (~50 km) is Tokyo, the place I have chose to be, racking up days that were not for Earth’s pall would be solid 4/5s. Being Tetraspace is good.