kokkaigijido mae
2008 September 30, Tuesday, 11:30 pm.
Deep underneath shiny Tokyo is this place.
Just waited for the train at Kokkai Gijido Mae Station (the national parliament building). The walls of the tunnel are not brick, but a grid of rectangular black steel boxes, made of something like I-beams. It continues all the way up to the black ceiling, which is caked on with years of blackness. This is the Diet building, so this is probably one of the oldest subway stations in Japan. What looks like pigeon shit has settled inside these open black cubicles; but actually, it's white flakes scraped off of the black metal on the walls and ceiling, untouched for decades. Someone has written numbers with white chalk onto each little box, and then abandoned it. Every few feet are dented pieces of aluminum that look stapled to the walls. This continues unvaringly into the darkness of the tunnel on the left, and unendingly along the platform on the right, which curves away and the end of it cannot be seen. It's like a scene from a horror movie. It already looks abandoned, a forgotten sewer where monsters live in the blackness, buried deep under a destroyed city, where no one has been for hundreds of years. It is like a nightmare. You wait for the train staring at this impossibly broken place, waiting forever as the train never comes and fear crawls invisibly from both ends of the platform. It isn't a dream, and you never wake up, which makes the unreality of this place even more oppressing until you want to scream.
Deep underneath shiny Tokyo is this place.
Just waited for the train at Kokkai Gijido Mae Station (the national parliament building). The walls of the tunnel are not brick, but a grid of rectangular black steel boxes, made of something like I-beams. It continues all the way up to the black ceiling, which is caked on with years of blackness. This is the Diet building, so this is probably one of the oldest subway stations in Japan. What looks like pigeon shit has settled inside these open black cubicles; but actually, it's white flakes scraped off of the black metal on the walls and ceiling, untouched for decades. Someone has written numbers with white chalk onto each little box, and then abandoned it. Every few feet are dented pieces of aluminum that look stapled to the walls. This continues unvaringly into the darkness of the tunnel on the left, and unendingly along the platform on the right, which curves away and the end of it cannot be seen. It's like a scene from a horror movie. It already looks abandoned, a forgotten sewer where monsters live in the blackness, buried deep under a destroyed city, where no one has been for hundreds of years. It is like a nightmare. You wait for the train staring at this impossibly broken place, waiting forever as the train never comes and fear crawls invisibly from both ends of the platform. It isn't a dream, and you never wake up, which makes the unreality of this place even more oppressing until you want to scream.