“Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”
- Le Corbusier

On the rare occasions when I visit Tokyo, I’m always struck by how vertical everything is.  Not just offices, but cafes and restaurants and all sorts of general-life things are inevitably on the umpteenth floor of some monstrous structure.

(In Akihabara, sometimes you can get lost, ascend through floors and floors of porn, and find yourself in a clothing store in a different building without ever having touched the ground.)

It’s wonderfully modern, this three-dimensional living space, and I quite like it in theory.  But actually living in said space, trying to navigate it, is soul-draining.

The city in Steins;Gate shows a rare side of Tokyo, at least for anime.  This isn’t the spacious and pretty world of Ore no Imouto, where the otaku shops are bright and all the maid cafes look fantastic.  It’s a crowded urban sprawl, with alleyways and power lines enclosing the sky.

When the characters aren’t in their tiny makeshift lab, they’re eating at a dingy hole in the wall, or having conversations at the coin laundry.  The café where Feyris and Mayuri work isn’t a total dump, granted, but it’s dimly lit and distinctly underwhelming.  The aura of color and class that we usually see in fictional maid cafés is completely absent.

The only escape is a concrete rooftop, looking out upon other rooftops.  It’s actually kind of horrible, this place where the characters live.  But the atmosphere is appropriate.

Contributing to the claustrophobia is the way that characters will just talk with no specific end, arguing for ages about nicknames or Dr. Pepper before they get to something plot-relevant.  This also strikes me as a very modern, very urban thing to do.

There are a few crucial ways in which the traditional Japanese perception of time differs from the West’s.  As Robert Levine puts it in A Geography of Time, a space that we would call “empty” is called “full of emptiness” in Japanese aesthetics.  By extension, time may pass, but whether it’s been “wasted” is completely subjective to culture.

One way this manifests is the idea of conversation, and the role of silence.  A lengthy pause that would make an American throw himself out the window from anxiety often means nothing in Japan.  It could even be a good time.

In fact, spoken words occupy time in the same way that bricks and bodies occupy space.  In the environment of Steins;Gate, the forced utter denial of silence carries its own kind of architectural weight.  Pointless?  Maybe.  But meaningless?

Mayushii's "tuturuu"s are cute, but I'm so drawn to Suzuha. Please don't tell me she wears a training jacket in summertime because she's covered in horrific keloid scars or something.

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