Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
The following text is from a movie review by J.P. Devine for The Morning Sentinel
Tokyo, Japan, and the surrounding cities in this year of 2012 truly have to be seen to be believed.
It is a futuristic lightning bolt, a city of glass and light, colors, real and imagined, sounds and smells that seem to be a Ray Bradbury sweet dream. It is at once a crystal ball that shows the future and a complex city that embraces and honors the past — and prepares to take it and package it up for a flight to outer space.
Tokyo is the epitome of cool.
Does a film about crows against the backdrop of Tokyo interest you? Can such a film be good for Japan’s rebranding after 3.11?
Tokyo Nancy Snow 
You have a truly philosophical way of viewing human existence. I minored in German and philosophy in the university and I miss those classes. You are asking the right questions: What is our life? How can we balance human activity with natural occurrences? Tokyo is very superficial in parts, which is why I truly appreciate “Tokyo Waka” to awaken our conscious awareness as a good documentary film can do. I plan to watch the entire film.
As the monk in the short film said, “We think outside of humans is the nature.” I agree with this statement. We often forget that humans are just one of the animal species. Many big cities, especially Tokyo, are covered with high-tech machines that seem to overwhelm nature. However, we are never able to go beyond nature, and that is what we recently recognized after the 3.11 earthquake. When we are in Tokyo, the superficial appearances cover up the nature. I have lived in Tokyo for 20 years, and I think I cannot get out from these untruths easily, but at least I really need to try.
I think Tokyo is the place where it is now filled with fake Japan. Japanese is not a nation that historically lives for profit. I think it comes from our lifestyle in the past, which was deeply connected to agriculture. But now, after World War II, it all changed to have too much of capitalism. Now there is a very small number of people doing agriculture. I think humans and all other creatures cannot survive without eating. Without surviving, we cannot do anything. It is said that Japanese food is healthy, but I don’t know how many busy workers in Tokyo, especially men over 30 years old, are living by eating only foods from a convenient store, which is far away from a healthy image of Japan.