The lights of Harajuku radiate in summer’s humidity.  A cacophony of illuminated signage simmers on the surface of every building, creating a beautiful, ethereal gauze of light, refracted in the heavy air, that drifts down the wide boulevard of Meiji-dori towards Shibuya.  These clouds of light float like a brilliant fog, diffusing the hard lines of the buildings they emanate from.  As much as the signs furiously signal specific locations and their services and delights, the signs also disguise the city’s architecture come nightfall.  The city’s solidity, its daytime facticity of organization and function, is overcome.  The lights: winking, flashing, amplified across surfaces of glass and metal, constitute an impermanent world that transforms the variegated facades with their wraithlike sheen. The luminescence of Tokyo’s ebullient youth district congeals at the broad intersections, settling unevenly on the pulsing throngs that alternately wait and cross. Within a firmament of neon, the crowds separate into moments of light and recognition: an arm darkly laced with tattoos, an upturned face with a gaze too brief to locate, a hurried step brings forward from the crowd a knee flashing in an unearthly light before disappearing in stride.  Bodies shift rapidly as they move across the intersection, scattering reflections from spangled jewelry, a red glow on a vinyl bag, a brilliant white blouse sharpens the curve of shoulders, and brings into relief a darkened throat.

We sit in the dark interior of Ryo’s car as shadowy masses vibrantly stream before the headlights.  Picked out in the otherworldly halogen lamps, faces are starkly lit from below as in the unearthly illuminations of a horror film.  I avoid the fierceness of their expressions caught as if in a time-lapse strobe flash, the very lights Ryo has packed among his photographic gear to record the intense movements of skaters.  Here, in the crosswalk, unprepared and prosaic, the grotesque fixity of the body engaged in the mundane of talking, looking, breathing startles me, like unconscious specimens, like moths frozen to death for the taxidermist’s pleasure.  Instead I watch for material details: a girl’s finely cut selvage denim jeans, another’s careful carapace of belts, a wrist of spikes, the styles of shoes, the sneaker brands, all brilliant and ghostly at once.  Before the light turns, I glimpse a woman as she turns, squinting into the headlamps, her face, erased of shadows, loses its features and disappears into a brilliant mask of skin.  

Easing through the intersection, we pass a cramped 7-11 convenience store or conbini where two young men stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to the glass wall of the store, their bodies rigid as they face a pair of police officers.  The cops are casually leaning into the faces of the young men.  One rests his hand on his belt in a pose both familiar and threatening while the other reaches both white-gloved hands forward.  In the backseat I turn uncomfortably so I can continue to watch as the officer frisks one of the men up to his armpits before I lose sight of the garishly lit scene.  I glimpse a cashier staring down at the same scene from within the store’s elevated interior.  “Stupid high school kids think they can come to Harajuku and get drunk and the cops won’t notice because there’s so many other kids,” Ryo speculates.  “Yeah, but the cop was frisking one of them, like they were gonna have weapons, like delinquents from Akira or something!” I counter.  Ryo and Itoshin laugh at my overheated comparison to the biker protagonists of the famous 80’s animated film.  They resume discussing where to go for the next trick, somewhere around here, but the number of people on the streets is prohibitive.  “I’ve got to piss!” Itoshin exclaims, “Go back to the conbini…we can check out that stair set in the alley right near there.”  Ryo pulls over and we leave our skateboards and photography gear in the car. Standing briefly as cars rush past, we then weave across the street towards the familiar squares of white fluorescence spilling from the 7-11 convenience store.  The cops and the kids are still there.  The older officer barks at them in a throaty voice, coarse and clipped, a cliché, like a detective from anime.  Ryo and I stop a few yards from the entrance while Itoshin bounds up the 7-11’s steps, pausing at the door and quickly turning to us, grimacing and tentatively making devil’s horns as a mocking, mischievous gesture about the police, but in front of his face rather than behind his head, so the cops won’t see.  Then he slides out of sight.  Ryo and I look down the street away from the cops, edging toward the alley.  Itoshin comes out a minute later. A cop abruptly grabs him. He barks for Ito’s identification. The younger cop looks down the sidewalk at us and nonchalantly we begin moving farther up the sidewalk and duck into the alley.  

A few minutes later Ito jogs around the corner. “Just fucking with everybody,” he laughs. Ryo and I walk down a few short stairs into a narrow tunnel crowded by a confusing set of concrete walls, pipes, and grates.  “Can you make anything on these?” Ryo asks, gauging the stairs with narrowed eyes.  “This place would look really cool if we could get a photo.” Without answering, Itoshin looks down the street in the direction of the cops, a look so casually one would easily miss how he carefully ascertained their potential for spotting us. Then he runs and jumps lightly down the stairs, imitating an ollie, the basic move in which the board and body are popped into the air.   He then moves to the wall along the stairs and runs his hands along a narrow ledge about 5 feet high and looks back at the top of the stairs, calculating the flight distance.  He looks up overhead and we laugh, simultaneously realizing the impossibility of making any trick: the ceiling to the passage is dangerously low.  Itoshin climbs to the top of the stairs once more and runs and leaps out to land on the ledge with both feet spread, simulating a 50-50 grind, but jumps down, laughing.  “Abunaaaaai!”—“so dangerous!”  I move deeper into the tunnel and spot two ugly clusters of grimy surveillance cameras sprouting from both of the passage’s walls.  Ryo, already moving back up to the street, shouts, “Who knows if those are working, but we better get out of here in case those are live feeds!”

I glance up again at the blank, eerie lenses of the nearest cameras encased in hard plastic boxes, blackened by years of pollution and bolted firmly to the wall.  Thin cables sagging like empty veins disappeared behind the metal mounting plates.  In the dim light the cameras appear as ossified creatures, forgotten sentries to this dirty, unassuming by-way left behind as the city nurtured its glittering surfaces elsewhere.  I was suddenly alert to the stink of urine and the walls felt oppressive, like the antechamber to a tomb.  Ryo’s caution seemed unfounded but nonetheless charged, responding to something other than simple security surveillance.  There could be no “live feed” here, recording the uninterrupted passage of dead time in a deadened place, but I leapt up the stairs anyway, wanting to leave this nameless corridor and its blank-eyed guardians.  

What had appeared promising about the alley’s stairs for a photograph—its immediately gritty and harsh surfaces being legible as authentically “street”—was transformed into something hostile by the cameras and the forbidding ceiling.  The harsh anonymity of the space made it an ideal location because as an image, excised from its contingent physical meanings, it would amplify a skaterly performance of authentic risk and creativity.  Somewhere between a bomb shelter and a post-industrial stage set, the passage functions as an absurd architectural gesture with its stairs leading down from the bland commercial repetition of the ordinary street to a place without destination or purpose.  In immediate contact with the order of the familiar thoroughfare, the passage is a chaotic absence dangerous enough to require four security cameras to restrain its constant suggestion to the adjacent street about disorderly possibilities.  Despite being situated in an infamous “youth” quarter of Tokyo, the alley was an architectural disruption to the clean, bright surfaces of adjacent corporate stores like 7-11 and the clever and fanciful facades of the nearby boutiques.  It existed as a permanent surprise amidst the tightly organized landscape around it, pointing to the potential for other, more invisible and unsecured spaces literally around the corner.  As a “surprise” in the built environment, the passage beckoned to Ryo and Itoshin with its aura of authentic surprise.  The unusual ledge without any apparent function, the claustrophobic density of the structures that together constituted the void of the passage, the forgotten cameras together created an urban vignette that could be constituted into value and meaning if a photograph could be made of a skater hitting a trick off that ledge.  The very act of seeing, exploring, and testing the space’s parameters is important in understanding how the skaters derived pleasure from being in the city and bodily investing unexpected spatial moments with purpose.  
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We drive down to the hill towards the major intersection where Harajuku flows into Shibuya and park near a fashion boutique with its windows carefully adorned in high-priced accessories. It’s gotten very late. A few people pass, some stumbling as they emerge from the garish throb of bars and clubs nearby. One of the last trains runs on the elevated Yamanote line to Shibuya station, its cars thrumming through Miyashita Park and the orderly homeless encampment of tarp structures slowly erected there by displaced day laborers after the economic crash in the early 90s. Ryo begins to assemble his lights at the shadowy perimeter of the broad 3-stair entrance to the boutique as Itoshin pulls a small block of wax from his bag and meticulously begins to rub it in tight circles along the face of the top stair.

I sit on the curb where a small alley feeds into the street, looking up at the quiet park with its defiant trees, located on top of a parking garage built in 1964. Unbeknownst to us, by the end of the summer of 2008, the park would become a flashpoint of homeless, artist, and activist resistance against corporate-sponsored gentrification.  It would be revealed that the Shibuya Ward government and Nike had been in secret negotiations resulting in a multi-million yen agreement for Nike to pay for the transformation of the neglected, narrow strip of park into a Nike-branded sports area, subsequently erasing a longtime refuge for older homeless men within some of Tokyo’s most expensive real estate. Central among its promoted features was a skateboard park, coinciding with Nike’s successful efforts to legitimate itself as a brand within the global skateboarding subcultural market after numerous failed attempts.  

With Ryo and Itoshin’s own media apparatus being deployed across the empty sidewalk, they were actively creating a mediated-body event in the highly mediated space of Shibuya with its massive screens casting a gilded digital sheen over the crowds crossing its intersections. “These large screens are now central to the experience of Shibuya because of their proximity to the railway station and their materiality produces a monumental media-architecture threshold that dwarves and supplants the existing traditional entrance arch…” (Morris 2010, 293). These huge screens, and the intensity of image-display shimmering across Shibuya’s consumer surface, put Shibuya into a mediated, globalized cultural drift.  The immediate architectural experience of the city is animated by these ambient projections of “elsewhere.” They flash and cut with a liveliness “that unwraps [Shibuya] by insistently pumping out images of multiple other places within Japan, from around the globe, and from the fantasy worlds of advertising” (ibid.). Screens proliferate on the street itself, held by nearly every passerby, glanced, studied, and scrutinized briefly. These screens interfaced with by the crowds only increase the sense of being in the midst of multiple worlds converging and wheeling off again, as if standing, rapturous, within an endless flock of rising starlings. It is no wonder film crews shoot Shibuya’s intersections again and again: the huge screens beaming in other worlds only to turn the crowded streets below into the Otherworld, an endless tableaux of Japan as endless youth imaginary.

Ryo and Itoshin were preparing to create their own visual texts within this contested zone of meanings, one grounded in the firm specificity of space situated within global signs of value. That is to say, the exclusive Harajuku boutique, closed for the night, was opened for new business. The very intensity of meanings conjured and flowing from the Otherworld described above was carefully cited in Ryo’s photographic composition of the boutique and its broad 3 steps. Even if Shibuya as cipher of an Orientalist techno-future enraptured with consumption was not fully in evidence, it was communicated through its fragments and detritus:  the garbage in the alley, the chips in the stairs, the worn surfaces. Mobilizing their media-body techniques here, so brazenly, challenged the hegemonic domination of the media surfaces just up the hill, past Shibuya Station. At the same time, it set up to document the pleasurable disorder youth-at-work/play could induce from the district, over and against the dominant discourse of youth as consumer.  “As a youth-centered consumer-oriented space, Shibuya was frequently positioned in…media discourses both as a literal location where this ‘[youth] problem’ was concentrated as well as a metonym for broader social anxieties about contemporary Japanese life” (Morris 2010, 298). Both the discursive and literal conceptions of youth in the city were being taken on: Itoshin began skating the top stair. He popped up and onto the edge of the 3rd stair, landing backside, with only the rear axle or truck on the edge and smoothly grinded down its length, popping off with a clean ollie over the sidewalk and into the alley beyond.  Ryo snapped a few quick test frames. The trick—and the photo—was being made in a highly recognizable space—a site redolent with youth significations and striking for its improbable transformation into a skate spot. At that moment we were yet another example and sign of youth disorder plaguing the area, amplifying the contestation of space epitomized by the homeless encampment up along the Yamanote tracks. With Itoshin’s skating flying through Ryo’s camera and light apparatus, they began to drift away from the mediating power exuded from the surfaces all around us, rearranging the meanings of space, focusing attention on the top stair and on the body and board moving along its distance. In this small moment of light and movement all other screens were forgotten. The world condensed into this fierce locus of energy. Itoshin got comfortable with the backside 5-0 grind and began doing a 360 flip out at the end, after grinding 5 or so feet of the stair lip. His determination was matched only by Ryo’s patience. The battery on my video camera was long dead and I was secretly grateful. I could enjoy watching this exchange unencumbered, unmediated. I guarded one of the tripod lights positioned at the end of the trick line, saving the light more than once when Itoshin’s board careened out from a bailed attempt. He landed a few and soaked in sweat, he paused to smoke. We sat on the low, decorative guardrail above the curb and watched the sparse traffic. Ryo held his camera in his lap and flipped through the many images he’d shot, occasionally holding up the camera so we could see the rear mounted screen. Itoshin peered closer at one. “Ha, my arms look stupid in this one!” Ryo laughed and advanced a few more images. “Look at you here though! So much worse!” The images replayed in static frames the intense velocity, balance, and intention Itoshin had released in the past 40 minutes. The lights bathed the stair set to make the action visible to Ryo’s camera but also defined the terrain of what constituted the trick-space as site of production. In only looking at the images, it would be easy to only analyze the camera’s technical framing as the dominant machine organizing the space. However, the lights physically transformed the space with their bright focus as a brilliant stage carved from the interplay of streetlights, headlamps, flickering lights and the shadows crossing and fading. Ryo’s light apparatus, so simple, were the critical component in altering the space into a zone of mediated exception. Rather than the illumination of Shibuya’s big screens, calling the eye up to their shifting, flat display of meaning, these lights drew out the ordinary space as space of performance and in collaboration with Ryo’s camera, media production.

Itoshin and I began playing around on a large, low metal cylinder with a sharply banked side. It was a nearly impossible obstacle to pop up onto until Itoshin finally did it, poised for a split-second before rolling backwards off onto the sidewalk. We were exhausted and laughing as we checked with Ryo to make sure he’d gotten all the shots he needed. Yeah, he said, let’s take it all down. We packed up and stowed the gear in the back of his car.

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