A Strange Mobile Stall
Strolling Through the City

Past the sleepless stretch

IchineiWell done on Season 1, both of you. How does it feel? For me it is simple: it was a good thing to run. I made friends every time, and I got to hear good stories. The walking is hard work, but the talk afterwards always runs hot.

TanakaHonestly, I am relieved. You never know whether the thing you pictured will land, or whether people will actually find it interesting. An idea being interesting and doing it being interesting are two different things, and without that second one you cannot keep going. If it were a one-off you could run it once and be done with it, good or bad. But I had already said we are doing nine of these. So if the first one flopped and nobody came to the second, I would still have nine to get through.
There was a stretch where I was not sleeping well, actually. After the first session, once I had seen how people reacted, some of the weight came off.

TerasawaI was not that worried. It was a Machistant Tanaka production, so I assumed a reasonable number of people would turn up. What I did not expect was people with no connection to us at all picking up the information and coming along. That surprised me, and I liked it.

TanakaA lot of them we were meeting for the first time. The ones I had assumed would come, oddly, mostly did not. Instead they waved at us in the street, or stopped us to say they were following on Instagram. Everyone took part in their own way.

IchineiIs there anything you set out to do deliberately that you feel actually worked?

TerasawaThe radio calisthenics, surely. That was good. Pulling the cart uses muscles you never normally use.

IchineiTrue. And radio calisthenics is just slightly embarrassing, which made it work as a ritual. It says: something is starting.

TanakaDoing something a bit embarrassing, something you would not normally do, was one of the ideas from the start. The other things I am glad about are the punch lines and the little record we made after every session. Some people came because they had seen one and wanted to know what had happened last time.

From the second session on, the group did radio calisthenics — the nationwide morning exercise routine — on the first floor above Books Suimon before setting off.

Walking without knowing why

IchineiWhat about doing the walk and the talk as a set?

TanakaIn my own work, talk first and then walk is the common one. You introduce the city and then everybody goes and looks at it. ARKHENODE was the other way round.

IchineiRather than deciding the destination and then going to see it, more like: walk without quite knowing why, and listen afterwards.

TanakaIf the talk comes first it turns into going to check on what came up, and I feel that makes it too earnest. Good as learning, perhaps.

TerasawaRight. Talk and then walk is easier to follow, but nothing beyond that happens.

TanakaAnd it was a small experiment, too: what sort of person turns up when what you are inviting them to is walking without knowing what it means?

IchineiIf nobody had come, the three of us would have been pulling the cart ourselves. I would have been fine with that.

TanakaAn event that consists of taking the cart out and putting it back 😂

TerasawaAnd we ran four sessions, two of them in the rain. I am grateful nobody shouted at us.

TanakaPeople were kind. Think about it: normally you would not want to put on a poncho somebody else has been wearing. But by then everybody was equally wrecked.

TerasawaI used to think I brought good weather. This taught me otherwise. The third session, the one I missed, had the best weather of the four.

IchineiThe fourth felt less like a walk and more like climbing a mountain. Rain, and that weight behind you. Nothing to do but keep going.

TanakaAnd yet the numbers barely changed between sessions. That was strange.

IchineiThat many people in that weather was remarkable. Normally you would just cancel 😂 A walk that is not at the mercy of the weather might be a small revolution.

Meeting again, through talk

TanakaAll of the guests are people whose businesses I helped open, as Machistant. I had seen plenty of what they do. But what they are thinking about while they do it, and what their roots are — that I was hearing for the first time. You cannot read what somebody is thinking off a menu. Getting at the words behind it was worth a lot.

TerasawaDid we ask them from the start to talk about their roots?

TanakaYes. Rather than what makes the shop appealing, I wanted to hear why they are standing in Maebashi now.

TerasawaThat is a good call. People running something in a city look very shiny, but when you ask about their childhood you find things in common, or the same thoughts. It is interesting.

IchineiKazumasa Sashide, who is one of our Season 2 guests, writes in On the Road 2: Super Well-being that relationships develop in the order being, becoming, doing. Adults normally meet each other at doing. You want coffee, so you go to the coffee shop — you can relate to people in a city as a function of that city. But before that there is meeting them as a person. That kind of meeting, or meeting again. Asking about roots turned out to be a very good way in.

This version of the city cannot be rebuilt

IchineiWas there anything that surprised you, that you only learned by doing it? For me it was that everybody loves the river. When I asked the guests how they like to spend a day off, most of them named the Hirose. Noguchi of CASA FRESCO gave it as a reason he opened where he did. As MEG said in the first session, maybe everyone is projecting their own river onto the Hirose.
The other thing was how many guests spoke about shops that have gone, and with real sadness. That place closed, didn’t it. Lately good shops do keep closing because nobody is there to take them over.
There are plenty of new shops in the centre, opened by people with a sense of purpose. And at the same time the city stops being the city it was. The more new things happen, the more I heard people missing what came before.

TanakaThose words come out precisely because each of them was attached to the place. But it is not only Maebashi — the same thing is happening everywhere. Within that, you could say Maebashi is unusual in that things are not only ending but also starting. Endings are sad, and yet it does not tip into negativity.
Still, it is true that the air inside a shop that ran for decades cannot be made again. There is a real fragility in that. Especially here, because further back there were far more people on these streets than there are now. Having lived through that kind of change is part of what Maebashi is.

IchineiPeople in their sixties tell me that the centre of Maebashi was so busy your shoulders knocked against other people’s as you walked. That the newest photo booth in the region was in town, so everyone went. City boys and city girls came into this centre looking for the latest thing.

TerasawaI cannot picture this city being like that at all. It sounds made up. Like a film or a drama. It does not feel real.

IchineiSo you have a generation who lived through that, a generation who has only ever seen empty streets, and a generation who knows nothing before the Maebashi of today. Three sets of people with completely different ideas of what a city is, all involved in the same one.
I am thirty-two, which puts me in the generation that saw the empty version. This city has genuinely changed in the last ten years.

Glad we built it, the mystery cart

IchineiThe fact that there was a cart was the strange part, and I think that was the good part. Seen from outside, it was the one thing that did not make sense. Walking makes sense, talking makes sense, the cart does not. Personally I think having an element nobody can explain matters.

TerasawaEveryone adapted to it so well. We never really explained it. High tolerance for being roped in 😂

TanakaWhat I like is that the cart has no engine and no brake. You have to manage the speed, the camber of the road pushes you around, rough surfaces are miserable. Walking on its own you barely notice any of that, but pulling the cart it comes up through your hands into your whole body, your legs especially.
You feel the city physically, so the road surface reaches you very directly. A bicycle cushions everything; this thing has puncture-proof tyres, always rock hard, so it bounces. And it is so heavy that on a slope you have to be careful it does not run away from you.

TerasawaIt is a machine for letting the city act on you.

IchineiA walk whose purpose is simply to walk together was a new idea, I think. And for that you did need the cart. It gave us a pretext for walking as a group, and walking slowly.

TanakaWe always meet in front of Books Suimon, and the people who live around there had clearly been wondering what it was. There is a boutique right opposite Suimon. I had barely met the owner, and the other day she came straight over — ah, this! I thought you were up to something interesting. What is it?
I work on the city centre full time as Machistant, but I rarely have professional reason to deal with the long-established shops. I get to speak to the trade association board, but hardly ever to an individual owner. So being spoken to like that was a real opening. And that she found it fun was a good day for me.

IchineiWhen you first brought this to Terasawa and me, you already had the cart as an idea. Why a cart?

TanakaA cart is a tool for moving easily and I had always been interested in them. I had built one myself once that could be taken apart, so they were familiar. And there is a book, Nihon no Machi de Yatai ga Odoru — carts dancing in the towns of Japan — which is well known in that world. I remembered its examples of carts changing the places they stood in.
Early on I did not have a clear picture of what functions the cart should have. But I wanted anyone who saw a group of people pulling it to think: right, the art festival is on. In the end it became a perfect cart, carrying both a function and a purpose. Plenty of people helped with the painting and the assembly, too.

IchineiMy keyword for the past year has been force of presence over ability. As technology spreads, AI included, the gap in ability between people closes. Writing as a job really is disappearing, because AI has raised everybody’s writing to a level. If you ask how you differentiate yourself inside that, the answer is not ability but presence.
And to have presence it helps a great deal to be physically large, or to move oddly. On that count, having this cart mattered. Not just we do city walks, but the force of an object being there. A crowd of people trudging through rain is force too.

TerasawaPut like that, it is quite a physical thing we made.

IchineiIt really is. Being exhausted together is an experience worth having. Like a sauna and a cold plunge.

It starts with “what is that?”

TanakaBecause it was physically hard, I remember the faces of the people who came. I think we would recognise each other somewhere else.

IchineiBeing able to make an acquaintance from zero as an adult is rare.

TanakaAnd acquaintance is exactly the level. Not strangers, but you do not know what they do for a living.

TerasawaThere were probably quite a few people taking part without really knowing what sort of gathering ARKHENODE is. Then again, we do not know what is going to happen either.

IchineiWhen somebody asks what this is, all we can say is: work it out yourself 😂

TanakaThe copy is good, though — Wander first. Meaning comes later. Let a mystery cart take you along, and enjoy not understanding. Most events say: everybody please come.

IchineiCalling it mystery ourselves was the right move. Somebody asks what it is, and we do not know either.

TanakaI still have not settled on how to describe the cart to people outside. Is it odd to call it mystery ourselves? But having a cart at all is not a normal state of affairs, so writing pulling a cart flatly felt wrong too.

TerasawaMystery cart might be about right.

TanakaFrom now on we put mystery in, with confidence.

IchineiCome to think of it, for something we are this fond of, the cart does not even have a name.

TanakaI felt that if we called it something like ARKHENODE No.1, something would be over.

TerasawaIt may be close to how it is for people out with a child. With a child you can start from the child, even with someone you have never met. Just having the cart shortens the distance.

IchineiAdults need a reason to start talking. Without a child or a dog in between, all you can manage is how’s work these days.

TanakaBecause you cannot tell what the cart is at a glance, the conversation can start from what is that? It gained stickers and functions week by week, and I think that generated conversation too.

It does not have to be a cart

TanakaIn most places people assume the street in front of the station is the centre of town. In Maebashi it is not, so young people often end up believing there is nothing in the centre of Maebashi. Nobody teaches you at school what is happening in Gunma’s towns right now.

IchineiHonestly, I only became able to walk ten or fifteen minutes from the station once I started coming into central Maebashi for work and for fun 😂 Before that I was deep in car culture and would drive to a convenience store three minutes away. There are a lot of people like that. Think about it plainly and that is far too little walking, so: let us walk about this much. Our literacy for walking could stand to be a bit higher.

TanakaLately there are these things called personal mobility devices. Segway-like things, self-driving things. They are convenient. All over the place people are researching how much travel time can be cut, how much psychological distance can be shortened.
Look at ARKHENODE as mobility and the cart makes the walking take longer, and doubles the excitement in exchange. Not we made it quicker and more convenient but it took twice as long and I have more friends.

IchineiA machine for amplifying the time and the quality of walking.

TerasawaMoving slowly is the richer thing, in the end. Walking is worth more than it was.

TanakaIt is the opposite of watching video at double speed. In that sense we may be making a small dent in the world.

TerasawaWalking a city was never meant to be something you are hurried through. Hurrying through a city is just transport. I would like to rethink what a city walk is.

TanakaThe way you run to train your body, you could walk slowly to train your head and your heart. Put that way, we do not need to be attached to the cart. Stilts would do. Deliberately walking slowly sounds like enough of a project on its own.

A hypothesis about Maebashi

TanakaSeason 2 is an open editorial meeting, so I want to get at the personal side of each guest, including why they became an editor. As little preparation as possible, straight into conversation. There is a proper talk event afterwards, so I would rather use this part for what will not come up there.

IchineiI want to take the Season 2 guests’ views and end up with a hypothesis about Maebashi. At the start of Season 2 it will only be a question, and I want to put it to each of them.
For example, it turns out that the river is one of the keywords for this city centre. So I want to ask them: in the cities you have watched, or the cities you work from, is there anything that plays the part the Hirose plays here?
It might be a mountain, or a road, or a shop. If many people name the same thing, that thing is part of what makes the place itself, and may be why people gather there. I think there is a clue in it.