This isn't an account of the cultural moment that indi-fashion hub Harajuku had before its gentrification by Major international brand stores, or a inane J-Travel blog complaining about being out of shape and there being too much walking, It's a possibly interesting story of personal growth only coincidentally related to Harajuku.
I didn't know what Harajuku was, and thought it was going to be some Japanese term for some psychological concept, like ikigai, kaizen, wabi-sabi, or something like that.
Disappointingly, it's about personal shrinkage - weight loss. Yes, you have to want to do it; people fail because they get hungry, and that can be surprisingly hard to fight. The magic GLP drugs work because they suppress hunger, at which point not eating becomes easier.
On the tracking point: I’ve found that a coding agent that can modify a file system (create and update CSVs) that’s accessible on both my laptop and phone to be the single best way to track things I’ve ever used. Bar none.
Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.
I think there's some evidence for this, and it's consistent with my experiences with myself and what I've seen in others.
It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.
There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.
A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.
I see this post is from 2024. Maybe I would have enjoyed the hook and enjoyed reading along to figure out what this "harajuku moment" was back in 2024. But since being exposed to AI slop daily, and having to scan through so much verbose AI outputs during day-to-day "coding", I've now started skimming so much that I got annoyed that it meandered, then just couldn't bother reading the rest of the post after I've figured out what the harajuku moment is.
It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.
Meh, you see all sorts. It's definitely much more touristed in the last decade. The heyday may have been late 90s and early 00s. See Fruits magazines and books. Certainly, "normal" Japanese avoid it, but they always have, just like Asakusa, Kabukicho, Roppongi etc.
That said, you still see Medatsu (目立つ) and lots of younger people there looking for fashion, because that's where many of the (overpriced) used clothing stores are. There used to be more weird bands and such doing pop-up shows or playing at the Yoyogi band shell. Still, lots of Japanese tourists as well as foreigners, and lots of food events/festivals around there.
Ancient Greek philosophy on mind-body developmental balance can help. A physically fit human with no intellectual development and a propensity to follow orders might be the fascist reinterpretation of the classical Spartan ideal, but this would have been viewed as unbalanced aberration. Similarly, producing geeky nerds who can rearrange complicated equations in their head with ease but who can’t run a mile or lift heavy objects is just as undesirable.
This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.
Plato’s Republic:
> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”
This isn't an account of the cultural moment that indi-fashion hub Harajuku had before its gentrification by Major international brand stores, or a inane J-Travel blog complaining about being out of shape and there being too much walking, It's a possibly interesting story of personal growth only coincidentally related to Harajuku.
Took a really long time to get to that point.
I didn't know what Harajuku was, and thought it was going to be some Japanese term for some psychological concept, like ikigai, kaizen, wabi-sabi, or something like that.
Disappointingly, it's about personal shrinkage - weight loss. Yes, you have to want to do it; people fail because they get hungry, and that can be surprisingly hard to fight. The magic GLP drugs work because they suppress hunger, at which point not eating becomes easier.
On the tracking point: I’ve found that a coding agent that can modify a file system (create and update CSVs) that’s accessible on both my laptop and phone to be the single best way to track things I’ve ever used. Bar none.
Even apps with the best UX, like Strong for tracking workouts, feel exponentially clunkier than having an agent that can answer questions, analyze pictures, and write things down on a persistent file in real-time.
I think there's some evidence for this, and it's consistent with my experiences with myself and what I've seen in others.
It's basically the idea behind the motivation to change literature, that there has to be some point at which the person has to be on board and interested in the change. It may be the desire to change isn't a discrete thing, that something builds over time, and we just become conscious of it at a particular time, or only remember certain moments, or whatever.
There has to be an opportunity though as well, which is another point people get tripped up on and why they lose motivation. Even if someone wants to change, if they don't perceive it as being possible for whatever reason, correctly or incorrectly, the desire for change doesn't have an outlet. It may rise to consciousness and then be immediately quashed because there's nowhere to go.
A lot of the time I think that's the bigger obstacle; it's not being aware of some desire to change, it's having some sense that the change isn't possible or that they don't know how to go about it, which amounts to the same thing.
I see this post is from 2024. Maybe I would have enjoyed the hook and enjoyed reading along to figure out what this "harajuku moment" was back in 2024. But since being exposed to AI slop daily, and having to scan through so much verbose AI outputs during day-to-day "coding", I've now started skimming so much that I got annoyed that it meandered, then just couldn't bother reading the rest of the post after I've figured out what the harajuku moment is.
It's like my brain is responding to blog posts now in the same way that people scroll past tiktok videos in the first few seconds if there isn't enough of a dopamine hit.
I used to enjoy longform content... alas.
Doesn't help that he's a self-help author so he's always written like an LLM, even before LLMs.
> We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters
Over 95% of the people in Harajuku are tourists going there to do exactly that. Locals completely avoid the area.
Meh, you see all sorts. It's definitely much more touristed in the last decade. The heyday may have been late 90s and early 00s. See Fruits magazines and books. Certainly, "normal" Japanese avoid it, but they always have, just like Asakusa, Kabukicho, Roppongi etc.
https://archive.org/details/fresh-fruits/mode/2up
That said, you still see Medatsu (目立つ) and lots of younger people there looking for fashion, because that's where many of the (overpriced) used clothing stores are. There used to be more weird bands and such doing pop-up shows or playing at the Yoyogi band shell. Still, lots of Japanese tourists as well as foreigners, and lots of food events/festivals around there.
As Nike might say… Just do it.
Ancient Greek philosophy on mind-body developmental balance can help. A physically fit human with no intellectual development and a propensity to follow orders might be the fascist reinterpretation of the classical Spartan ideal, but this would have been viewed as unbalanced aberration. Similarly, producing geeky nerds who can rearrange complicated equations in their head with ease but who can’t run a mile or lift heavy objects is just as undesirable.
This is a historically valid concept, not a convenient utilitarian fiction for the indoctrination of the youth into proper behavior. The idea was that γυμναστική (gymnastikē) and μουσική (mousikē) should be balanced for optimal human outcomes.
Plato’s Republic:
> “Those who devote themselves exclusively to gymnastic become more savage than they ought to be, while those who devote themselves to the other arts become softer than is good for them… The former, if they had no contact with the Muses, become filled with brute force and a mindless boldness; the latter, if they have no training in gymnastic, become cowardly and feeble in soul.”