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From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD "MY LOST CITY"

On the last day of our visit to Tokyo, my wife led me to a Japanese-style restaurant located at the top floor of a superhigh-rise multistoried tower Shiodome City Center. As it was just minutes before noon, we were able to be seated at a table by the window. The landscape we got at the view point was ... hmm, that was why we dared to stay in the capital city during this vacation time. I think any of our language could never describe those visual aspects of our metropolis, not because of our ability to deliver, but of our language itself which like our gene characteristics could not keep up with the torrential transformation of so called 'hyper-capitalism'. Taking pictures incessantly and tasting purely Japanese traditional 'Yuba' at whiles in front of your dearest one, you would come near to being convinced that all of your wish is fulfilled - at least for a while. One of my peculiar obsession at that time was each of those towering skyscrapers and geometrically designed urban space appeared to be as it IS since time began and throughout the ages on contraty to Fitzgerald's impression referring to the transient 1930s as "rose the Empire State Building". Next to our window there stands huge Dentsu headoffice building soaring even higher (210m) than our view angle. Few adpeople working there on holidays, the architecture of the building is fully transparent to you across the facade which has chromatic gradation on its myriad of rectangular windows. Ornamental plants in a corridor look minute as such phytoplankton and arrays of capsule elevators go up and down silently without friction as though they are luminescent abyssal fishes in Marian Trench. For every creature has its beginning (whosever created it), this building also must have risen from the ruins. But there seems no trace of artifice that was signified even on the major constructions of dams and bridges to proclaim dignity of human labor. And what about the limits? Could we identify the limits by which Fitzgerald came to the realization of the city? Alas, there's no country, no expanse of green and blue or should we say the constructor was wise enough to keep the building from rising lethally high? All I could view in the horizontal limit was Yokohama Landmark Tower and its siblings huddling ironically like a grand cathedral and city halls in a medieval site of pilgrimage. Even though we could even say the progress of urbanization resembles moss or mold filling the earth, I would rather assume different mechanism in nature and capitalism. Natural phenomena such as planetary orbit, river formation obey differential equations, which implicate an analytical structure. On the other hand capitalism seems to represent the completely different mathematical structure i.e. algebra. This idea flashed into my mind simply because the outer appearance of the high-rise tower reminded me of a huge matrix (pay-off matrix?) or a high-dimentional tensor but it could still be suggestive because algebra is highly abstract field in mathematics and it never counts on concrete numbers. High above the ground, surrounded by the tempered glass and hearing only a sound of water stream irrigated in a miniature Japanese garden, you will completely understand why the artistic avant-garde came to a standstill in the late 20th century. We didn't intend to come this far. Almost none of us intended. We were forced to come this high and far so this is not a frontline. This is as sort of an asylum where silence make you look back on how far you have just come. It is difficult for you to keep upfront when you don't know where to go. Then, no prophet no revelation at all? Among all the fine works showcased in the "Museo del Prado exhibition" at Ueno, what attracted me most was "Venus with Organist and Cupid" by V. Tiziano (1490 - 1576). That doesn't mean I was instilled by the allegorical drama between sesuality and music. I was caught by a pair of young man and woman leaving for the sunset cuddled up closely to each other. That was a symmetric scenery of what I had seen hours before at Tokyo Station. A cool dressed young cupple sitting closely in a two-seater on Yamanote Line, listening probably to pop music by sharing their stereo headphones, dissappeared as the sea snake creeped away into the wilderness of soaring towers...