This excerpt is from an essay Mende contributed in December 2001.
During a period of time, I often felt that my thoughts were rather unstable. I had a habit of continuing conversations without coming to clear conclusions about whether something was good or bad, whether I liked it or disliked it. In essence, I had an indecisive personality that gauged the other person’s reactions while engaged in conversation. One could say this is typical of Japanese people, but I believe my profession as a designer contributed significantly to this tendency. We lighting designers have a job that involves listening to many people’s demands while skillfully handling contradictory conditions to solve a puzzle.
It was after meeting Koharu Kisaragi that I was strongly compelled to reflect on this weakness of mine. Koharu Kisaragi, in complete contrast to me at that time, spoke about the light of the modern city with a strikingly fresh perspective.
“I love glowing vending machines.” That was her first statement when we invited her to appear at the Lighting Detectives Practical Workshop Series that we organized in the fall of 1996. “Vending machines may seem to be everywhere in the city, but they’re actually passive. They can’t do anything on their own unless we humans approach them and access them. They don’t know what to do with themselves, and that blankness reminds me of urban Japanese people. Everyone is in a crowd, yet they’re alone…” she continued.
At that time, I was hesitating over whether to call vending machines—which dominate the city and glow brightly 24 hours a day—the great sinners of the 20th century. I spoke to her in a faint voice about the basis for vending machines’ social criminality, but she seized the initiative and I had no chance of winning. It’s fair to say that from the start, there was a difference in intensity that made it impossible for me to pick a fight. In the first place, when we invited her as a guest for this workshop series, she immediately responded, “Oh, I’d like the vending machine theme.” This made perfect sense, as her play “Another,” written during her student days, was about a street corner vending machine.
From the time I named the practical lighting culture research group “Lighting Detectives” in 1990, I had been amused to call the glowing vending machines in our everyday surroundings “End of the World Street Lanterns,” while at the same time being intimidated by their rampage. I dismissed them as “traps of modern commercialism, pretending to comfort lonely urbanites while making. Also heinous criminals who have stolen conversations with the old lady at the corner tobacco shop.” However, whether Koharu Kisaragi was an extraordinary philanthropist or my heart had grown thin, even as I attempted to engage in a debate, I was already faltering.
Her clear perspective was not limited to vending machines, but extended to the numerous red lights—aviation warning lights—that strangely dramatize the skyline of skyscrapers. According to Japanese regulations, buildings taller than 60 meters must be equipped with red lights to avoid collisions with aircraft. Moreover, on super high-rise buildings, these lights must repeatedly flash (though these regulations have been somewhat relaxed…). Ask anyone, and the typical response would be, “Those flashing red lights are irritating,” “They’re really annoying,” or “They’re tasteless, aren’t they?” But privately, I didn’t dislike those aviation warning lights, like red spider lilies blooming in clusters at night. At the end of an exhausting day, when looking toward Ginza, Shinjuku, or Tennōzu late at night, it seems as if the city’s energy was like flying sparks in the darkness. Gazing absentmindedly at those irregularly flashing lights, they begin to resemble the rhythm of heartbeats and the breathing of tired people living out there. The countless red lights appear like fragments of life. What an artistic scene..
Koharu Kisaragi apparently viewed the lights from the direction of Kichijoji on the Chuo Line. The quiet cityscape before dawn. She said it was exciting to watch the aviation warning lights flashing along the silhouette of high-rise buildings in the Shinjuku subcenter. The same mentality that led her to call lonely vending machines “my friends,” she embraced the flashy red of the aviation warning lights that everyone else disliked. Could Koharu Kisaragi perhaps be a savior of society’s outcasts and the socially vulnerable? Her willingness to accept both vending machines and aviation warning lights might have been expressions of her loneliness, kindness, and compassion toward society.
I vowed to change my attitude of not clearly stating whether something was acceptable or unacceptable. Designers, as professionals, should rightfully demonstrate clarity and kindness. From that point on, I decided to “think things through thoroughly, without going against my own impressions, and clearly determine what’s right or wrong.” Without doing so, there could be no possibility of productive discussion.
Light / illumination / lighting must have been an important theme for Koharu Kisaragi. I am convinced of this by seeing her passionately discuss the lights of the city. But now, let me venture a counter argument to Koharu Kisaragi. The proliferation of vending machines, bright red aviation warning lights, and 24-hour convenience stores—you are all criminals of the 20th century. We cannot possibly continue to live harmoniously with lonely vending machines forever. In the 21st century, culprits will likely be reborn in more refined forms. However, how much will these heroic forms, which Koharu Kisaragi never imagined, become a force for innovation in the cityscape and our lives? Will the day come when we can actually become friends with vending machines?
