I write about Alisa Freedman's excellent Tokyo in Transit in today's Japan Times.
Movement is central to modernity. Baudelaire's flaneur, a walker drifting through city streets, "a perfect idler, ... a passionate observer," who is a part of the urban throng even as he remains apart from it, is paradigmatic. The flaneur, however, was more a response to the changed times than an agent of that change. Trains, on the other hand, are central to the genesis of the new world that was born, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, "on or about December, 1910."
Read it all here, and if you do, you know, like it, don't hesitate to hit the "like" button.
--David