After reading Ōyama Shirō’s memoir, A Man With No Talents (San’ya gakeppuchi nikki), I became interested in this Tokyo district for day laborers, now becoming popular among foreign visitors for its budget accommodations. In Blair McBride’s Digital Journal piece “Mysterious Past Meets Uncertain Future in Tokyo’s Sanya District” I discovered the area’s dark history as a ghetto for the “Burakumin” underclass, as well as an Edo Period execution grounds. Considering that the Japanese government virtually erased all references to Sanya on area maps during the 1960’s, I decided to look up the area on a 10,000:1 scale map of Tokyo I own. I tried using the Google Translate application on my phone, producing strange results as the application tried to decipher not only the Kanji characters and their context to one another, but individual radicals, or Kanji elements within a greater Kanji. In the above video, words pop on the screen at a dizzying pace, resulting in a stream of pseudo-consciousness.

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