Maps

Tokyo is surely the most meticulously mapped city in the world. A vast network of maps is positioned around the city to guide wandering souls through the urban maze. Maps hang prominently in stations, on platforms, in front of police boxes, in shopping areas, inside stores -- often floor-by-floor. Magazines are filled with maps detailing directions to restaurants, nightclubs, bars and obscure old shops, monuments and museums. Advertising for places big and small inevitably includes a map. Even the most out-of-the-way neighborhoods have hand-painted maps hanging on sidewalk fences.

People can be seen on almost any city street clutching computer print-out maps or cell phone display maps trying to find where they want to go, frowning at the difference between the map and the territory. Of course, the cell phone can circumvent the need for maps by calling and asking for verbal directions. But even with that spoken guiding, a map is a singularly essential item in Tokyo that few who veer off the known path can do without.

However, maps can be seen to be more than just a practical tool. The level of painstaking detail and their sheer omnipresence reveal maps to have deeper roots. They are fastidiously accurate when rough accuracy would do, and are provided too often and too conveniently to be just another commercial lure.

First of all, a map in hand helps preserve the comfortable option of anonymous non-engagement. They spare the embarrassment of having to ask for directions. In this sense, maps become another polite social form of communication, that is, a kind of spatial bowing. And they preserve privacy. With a map in hand, no one need ever know where you ultimately are going and you need never be embarrassed to be lost. You're always somewhere on the map.

The other social function of maps is to help regulate the boundary between inside and outside, an important distinction in Japan. The map moves one towards an interior space, or more accurately, a succession of interiors, without revealing what that space might be. Interiors are comfortably exteriorized.

Maps rely on idealistic perfectionism. They are neat, prim and often somewhat cute. They are pleasing in and of themselves, satisfying in their two-dimensional coherence. Tokyo is a series of charmingly confusing obstacles -- buildings, stairs, escalators, tunnels and pathways channel walkers along shapes, corners, angles and vectors. One needs abstract, accurate help to navigate even the simplest and shortest areas.

Maps also provide a regularizing of space, a set of coordinating visual clues that are satisfyingly atemporal. Though, of course, last year's map may possibly not be much help this year. But with a map, you can go back, and tell other people how to go as well. They provide stasis in the middle of the frenetic motion of individuals across the confusing expanse of urban territory. They allow you to move in -- if not exactly straight then at least more direct -- lines through a city composed of endless circularities.

Maps are also important for their point of view. Their objective, overhead clarity is highly unusual in Tokyo. The disorienting upward brushstrokes of tall, close buildings packed together make it difficult to find a standpoint from where to chart direction. Without a map, all you have is walls, more walls, signs, and people. Wandering through a succession of three-dimensional blockades, an address is often as worthless as the paper it's written on. Unlike many cities, Tokyo offers few vantage points from which to get bearings.

In a city of constant flux, with its ceaseless destruction, construction, additions, shifting, and moving around, maps offer the brief consolation of stability. They provide a photographic record of what is repeatable across a bewildering temporal inconstancy. Maps allow the bending of the existential mantra of cell phone users, "Ima doko desu ka?" ("Where are you?") into the calming pleasure of "I am here."

-- Michael Pronko