fuel of the future

The petrol station (gasoriin sutando) on Zaimokucho Street just around the corner from where we lived for all those years did not have it’s bowsers in the standard positions. They were floating in the sky. Well, on the roof. The attended would tug on a special chord and the hose would magically descend as required. It was just another of the many quietly thrilling innovations that we used to encounter during our extended stay in Tokyo.

Other thoroughly modern contraptions (for the time) included automatic train pass and ticket reading turnstiles, ferris wheel car parks (there was one in Roppongi) and, of course, the birth of digital watches and the ground breaking Sony Walkman.
 
We had come from a simple life in a small house on the edge of the bush and landed right into the middle of the future. In a way it was almost as though we had time travelled. Things that were common then, in Tokyo, would not start appearing back in Australia for twenty years, sometimes longer.

Of course, all the electronic games, Space Invaders and the like, originated in Japan and were immensely proliferate. I do believe that all the early year game play and computer screen involvement my brothers and I had so long ago prepared us for the tech focused existence of the current era. We were early adopters and continued to expand our skills and relationships with hardware and software.

Simple things like riding my motorcycle through the Tokyo metropolitan streets at night stand out, too, as exhilarating, semi-futuristic interactions exclusive to my time there. It was such an efficient city, too, in so many ways that connecting with it, as an organic interface of sorts was exciting and rewarding. Riding the subways - from here to there, changing lines smoothly, every train right on schedule - like a little mouse in giant electric maze was a common pleasure. (Unless it was packed like a can of oysters!)

And then, once you had settled down somewhere, arrived at your destination, the connection with whoever you may encounter was rewarding in a very different way. It was bound to be courteous, gentle, helpful. The people themselves, inhabiting the grand machine, were the essential oil that kept things working smoothly and made the entire experience warmly human and soulfully connected.

It’s funny, only now as I write about it, can I fully appreciate the scope of the awesomeness that was available to me, my reality, in that time and place. At the time, it was normal. Now, I can see that it was really quite extraordinary. ​