Fukuoka feels like a big city, after southern Kyushu, but it’s still pretty compact. It’s not like Seoul or Tokyo, and I walked around a major portion of the “downtown” yesterday, mostly the Tenjin and Hakata areas.
I ended up in a big, futuristic mall called Canal City. I’ll add a picture later. Funny how malls everywhere are the same. I always remember when I ended up in a mall in Temuco, Chile, and I was wandering around, thinking, “Wow, this is a mall in Temuco, Chile, but it feels just like any other mall.”
I once had a brainstorm about the nature of our global civilization – what characteristics of our cities and cultures would be most salient to an anthropologist in the far future, or from a different planet? And I decided that those hypothetical anthropologists would realize one of the unifying elements was the existence of malls.
That means their name for us would be: “The Mall Builders.” Which is a name that sounds suitably ominous and monumental for a global civilization reduced to dust by the ravages of time.
[Canal City Mall, Fukuoka]
