Minami-aoyama provincial

Beyond Chiyoda-ku starts foreign provinces. Such is the case with Minami-Aoyama where I find my trails almost daily recently. Everything is foreign. I almost wish they would check passports at Omotesando station exit. I must write a tune, a walking tune on the step of "I don't belong to this". I have found a back street trail to avoid that crossroad where young underpaid masked girl bakers surrounded by a forest of fruits are building fruit tarts in a full transparent laboratory like kitchen open to the full view of the passersby. Fruit tarts looking totally tart. It is easy to sneer at Minami-Aoyama, so pretentious, so rich and tasteless. The Prada boutique, mostly glass, is so airy that it strongly suggests the fact that maybe not even 30 years ago, the area was a provincial, outskirt kind of land with no urban roots, a flatland where locals were growing vegetables. There were rice paddies maybe. The ridiculous side of Aoyama and Omotesando stems from that very fact: a provincial quarter pretending to be urban but stinking of earth all the same. Well, the arrogant riches are certainly not supported in a good way by the tasteless architects they hire. I realized that the glazed tiles that most modern buildings are covered with is a major factor contributing to the malaise that oozes from houses that look fake if not entirely dead like tombs. Surrounded by such despairing buildings stands this one empty oddity on the picture. A provincial home where some sleeping beauty may be waiting for a kiss. The bulldozers will certainly play the charming prince in the coming years. Different in style with my dream house in Kudanshita, it belongs all the same to a vanished unpretentious yet discreetly gorgeous time of rich people with taste and provincial estate mansions spelling the quietness of the countryside.