After a few minutes of existential crisis I came back to the reception and explained in the most simple English possible that I am an architect and I need good natural light for my hand drawings (I doubt they would understand if I said it was for my mental health), and unexpectedly they moved me into a corner room on the same floor without much resistance - still pretty shabby, very dusty but with two windows and a street view, and oh, it is a bit wider, now there is even enough space for a yoga mat on the floor! As soon as the door closed I realized that I was far too sleepy to do anything productive and just struggled to stay awake by talking on the phone until 20:30 to make my jetlag a bit easier to deal with tomorrow.
It looks pretty okay if you don’t switch on the ceiling light and don’t look closely at the furniture and the carpet. I guess they fired most of their cleaning staff during corona crisis because it seems there was no wet cleaning done for many months in a row.
Quarantine Day 1
Yesterday I wrote way too much, I know most of you didn’t read it all so today I’ll keep it short (also because nothing really happened, but you can go back and read about the previous day if you have time). I did a very thorough dust cleaning in my room and had the food I brought from Russia for breakfast. The university and the tourist agency wrote me that I can’t leave the hotel building and I’m supposed to get my food in a convenience store on the ground floor or use uber eats, but both options are very limited if you want to eat healthy food and avoid meat. So I started doubting and googled that Japan actually doesn’t have any penalties for leaving your house during post-arrival self-isolation, people are allowed to buy food and the only real rule is not to use public transport. I gathered my courage and decided to test if going out of the hotel would get me in any trouble. Guess what - it haven’t (yet)! Bought some nice sushi and was happy to assert my (partial) freedom.
Yesterday I wrote way too much, I know most of you didn’t read it all so today I’ll keep it short (also because nothing really happened, but you can go back and read about the previous day if you have time). I did a very thorough dust cleaning in my room and had the food I brought from Russia for breakfast. The university and the tourist agency wrote me that I can’t leave the hotel building and I’m supposed to get my food in a convenience store on the ground floor or use uber eats, but both options are very limited if you want to eat healthy food and avoid meat. So I started doubting and googled that Japan actually doesn’t have any penalties for leaving your house during post-arrival self-isolation, people are allowed to buy food and the only real rule is not to use public transport. I gathered my courage and decided to test if going out of the hotel would get me in any trouble. Guess what - it haven’t (yet)! Bought some nice sushi and was happy to assert my (partial) freedom.
Quarantine Day 2
Today I found a plastic bag with clean towels and bed linen hanging on my door but thought that changing it on the second day is not environmentally friendly so I brought it inside for later. Hotel staff cannot clean my room for the whole duration of my quarantine, makes sense, but the room was so dusty from the beginning that I continued my frustrated wet cleaning routine in the morning and realized there is a thick layer of white dust under the bed. The situation called for a vacuum cleaner, so I went to the reception in the hopes they will let me borrow the machine. The woman on duty became totally terrified when she heard my request. “No, no, I cannot let you take it, it’s impossible”. I was kind of expecting this to be honest and asked: “Okay, so what should we do?”. She went to consult her superiors in the room behind the counter and came back holding the vacuum cleaner. “I will do it myself”, she said. Japan is a country of precedents; if no guest was ever allowed to borrow vacuum cleaners before, there is no way it will happen, even if it’s not that problematic considering the other new rules interfering with the usual procedure. The rule of no cleaning in quarantined rooms is reasonable, but it seems that no one among the staff really understands why it was made in the first place, they just follow generic guidelines without questioning them. So she came into my room, zero hesitation about coronavirus. We moved the bed together, but the machine was so old and weak that some areas were left as dusty as they were and the receptionist just pretended that it’s supposed to be like that anyway and left. I got even more frustrated and went out of the hotel again to buy cleaning supplies and finish the job myself because I started getting some kind of allergy already. I figured I will explain it to the university if they will be notified about my absence and thought it should be okay. When I was exploring the pedestrian shopping area nearby in search of a 100-yen shop, I found an absolute gem — La Cittadella, an extraordinary array of “Italian-style” buildings forming a semi-open department store with an amphitheater that has a fountain instead of a stage…
To an ordinary passerby unfamiliar with Italian townscapes it might look pretty normal, but if you’re fairly familiar with European culture, it’s like looking at those extra-realistic robots who resemble humans too much and you get extremely uncomfortable because it just feels… wrong. I will quote a comment from my Japanese architect-friend who spent his childhood in the same neighborhood, often going to Cittadella for movies: “Japanese people have this innocent aspiration towards the Western cityscape, they are used to see it on TV and in commercials. For us it is “Italy”, even though it is a pseudo-experience”. Lacking Western cultural context, it is very easy for Japanese architects to recognize and replicate visual elements and symbols of Italian architecture (fountains, amphitheaters, tile pavements, colors of the facade, even the shape of a piazza), but almost impossible to understand how they are supposed to be linked together (proportions, scales, functional context), so in the end we have a bizarre dream-like built environment, made out of familiar elements but distorted, put together in an unsettling way or misused, misinterpreted. Very similar thing keeps happening to Italian restaurants’ interiors and even the food they serve — looks kind of similar, but tastes slightly (or sometimes not slightly) wrong. I used to complain about it, but let’s remember that we have pretty much the same understanding of Japanese culture in Europe — we love and replicate those inspiring visual elements but don’t have enough information to understand the context.
Today I found a plastic bag with clean towels and bed linen hanging on my door but thought that changing it on the second day is not environmentally friendly so I brought it inside for later. Hotel staff cannot clean my room for the whole duration of my quarantine, makes sense, but the room was so dusty from the beginning that I continued my frustrated wet cleaning routine in the morning and realized there is a thick layer of white dust under the bed. The situation called for a vacuum cleaner, so I went to the reception in the hopes they will let me borrow the machine. The woman on duty became totally terrified when she heard my request. “No, no, I cannot let you take it, it’s impossible”. I was kind of expecting this to be honest and asked: “Okay, so what should we do?”. She went to consult her superiors in the room behind the counter and came back holding the vacuum cleaner. “I will do it myself”, she said. Japan is a country of precedents; if no guest was ever allowed to borrow vacuum cleaners before, there is no way it will happen, even if it’s not that problematic considering the other new rules interfering with the usual procedure. The rule of no cleaning in quarantined rooms is reasonable, but it seems that no one among the staff really understands why it was made in the first place, they just follow generic guidelines without questioning them. So she came into my room, zero hesitation about coronavirus. We moved the bed together, but the machine was so old and weak that some areas were left as dusty as they were and the receptionist just pretended that it’s supposed to be like that anyway and left. I got even more frustrated and went out of the hotel again to buy cleaning supplies and finish the job myself because I started getting some kind of allergy already. I figured I will explain it to the university if they will be notified about my absence and thought it should be okay. When I was exploring the pedestrian shopping area nearby in search of a 100-yen shop, I found an absolute gem — La Cittadella, an extraordinary array of “Italian-style” buildings forming a semi-open department store with an amphitheater that has a fountain instead of a stage…
To an ordinary passerby unfamiliar with Italian townscapes it might look pretty normal, but if you’re fairly familiar with European culture, it’s like looking at those extra-realistic robots who resemble humans too much and you get extremely uncomfortable because it just feels… wrong. I will quote a comment from my Japanese architect-friend who spent his childhood in the same neighborhood, often going to Cittadella for movies: “Japanese people have this innocent aspiration towards the Western cityscape, they are used to see it on TV and in commercials. For us it is “Italy”, even though it is a pseudo-experience”. Lacking Western cultural context, it is very easy for Japanese architects to recognize and replicate visual elements and symbols of Italian architecture (fountains, amphitheaters, tile pavements, colors of the facade, even the shape of a piazza), but almost impossible to understand how they are supposed to be linked together (proportions, scales, functional context), so in the end we have a bizarre dream-like built environment, made out of familiar elements but distorted, put together in an unsettling way or misused, misinterpreted. Very similar thing keeps happening to Italian restaurants’ interiors and even the food they serve — looks kind of similar, but tastes slightly (or sometimes not slightly) wrong. I used to complain about it, but let’s remember that we have pretty much the same understanding of Japanese culture in Europe — we love and replicate those inspiring visual elements but don’t have enough information to understand the context.