The world's longest escalator?

Day 1 of Tokyo Performing Arts Market and our Connected mini-showcase. The venue for much of it, Metropolitan Art Space, is conveniently next door to our hotel. It is, to be honest, a huge and rather non-descript slab of concrete with an over-designed front of glass & steel, built in the late 80s when money was no object. A tremendously long escalator is suspended in the cavernous atrium which takes people from ground to 5th floor in one go. I half expect the pearly gates at the top. We register and filter down clinical corridors into a soulless meeting room for a kick-off seminar on the state of Japan's performing arts scene. So far so bland.

But it's the people that make these things tick. After lunch we run a briefing for the artists and delegates and get them to write out their aspirations on post-its which we stick on the walls. Then there's the official opening reception with, amazingly, only one speech. We film and interview people and then most of our crowd head off to a show across town. I stay to see a concert by Yasuaki Shimizu (sax) and Keiichiro Shuibuya (piano). It's good to see Yasuaki and Lisa afterwards, and I also bump into magazine editor Masa Sugatsuke and others from my previous life here. I should also say that the auditorium is very nice.

It's still only 9.30pm so, on a whim, I take the Yamanote line to Shinjuku and indulge myself for an hour in Tower Records which I know will still be open. Wonderful to browse through racks and racks of CDs, all beautifully over-packaged and overpriced. I limit myself to Haruomi Hosono's Love, Peace & Trance from 1994 and a YMO double live CD, recorded in London a couple of years ago. Bit predictable but it seemed appropriate.