Ikebukuro rant - 2003

There is a huge tower in my neighborhood. It is an imposing structure, rearing up over the distorted, disjointed Tokyo skyline. The flashing red lights on its sides are meant to warn off approaching airborne vehicles, I guess. Every day, every night, I am told, it spews out dangerous chemicals over our heads, on our balconies, onto our food, onto the wash drying in the sun. It is a trash tower. It sits on top of a great pile of burning garbage, and the fires in its belly send smoke, residue, and the alleged chemicals flowing up its innards to be displaced elsewhere. Where is it supposed to go? Did we think about this? It burns, and it is gone. Nothing is ever gone, not really. It is always somewhere, as something. You can’t ever lose something, you can’t really destroy anything, it only changes into something else, it only moves to another place. If you look through a larger lens, we’re putting the garbage somewhere even more insidious than inside our cans in the kitchen. Now we can’t see it, but it’s everywhere.
It’s a big tower, and it’s killing me. Well, maybe very, very slowly, and maybe I’d have to sit underneath it my whole life, but it is. It is a big Death Tower. Every day it sits in judgment of my sins, looks me up and down, and, raising its nonexistent chin up into the air and smugly arching its eyebrows, mutters something like, “It’s death for you, buddy boy.”
The tower is attractive. Now forgetting that Freud ever said anything about long, rectangular structures, I can examine the utter simplicity of its form. Six-sided and smoothly extending its effortless arm upwards over the train yard it sits beside, my tower harkens to a utilitarianism seized upon by certain fascist architects in Europe around the 1930’s, creating huge monuments and government buildings. A functionality of death. Almost as if designed by necessity. The last gasp of a government agency bent on incineration.