Shinjuku Station begins here: The Beauty and The Beast

Black Friday. A frenzied mob stampedes into a Wal-Mart at five in the morning, literally breaking down the doors and trampling a 34 year-old store employee to death, crushing and killing him. That night I find myself walking the streets of Tokyo, the prince city of modern American-style capitalism. There are christmas decorations up, but there's no christianity, it's just a way to vary the commercial effect; different ads, another reason to shop. This isn't cynicism; Japan is not a christian nation, christmas here is just a seasonal holiday, bells and lights and whistles.

And besides, even within the American context, this is well beyond cynicism. A man died; a man was murdered by a sales-hungry horde, too busy competing with one another to stop and help pick a fellow human-being up off of the floor. Sad, beyond sad, frightening; indicative of something deeply wrong within the modern American social fabric. Oh, no, I said to myself as I saw the headline; Oh, no.
But then tonight, I was in Shibuya, probably the apex of the Tokyo sound and light show, a neon galaxy. On a pedestrian walkway above the road, isolated with this longing, ethereal music in my headphones, I watched this astonishing machine take apart the street below me. A long yellow arm laced with hydraulics, ending in a silver pincer; it drove down into the asphalt and lifted up great slabs, held them as it swung to the side and then suddenly crushed them into sand and fragments. It was the way it moved; with power, with subtlety, with intelligence and obvious intent. It could've gently plucked a kitten from a tree, or crushed a car with a single downward blow. The extent to which it was able to move as an extension of its human operator seemed unbounded, beyond anything I've ever seen.
So I'm torn; torn between the marvels and the madness. Market forces certainly drive innovation, give birth to amazing works of human ingenuity; they also push the notion of "goodwill to all mankind" down to the bottom of the pile. Down in the center of the earth there's supposedly a "molten core", right? Well, what is it, what is that; is it a heart of light, or is it just an empty fire?