A4 - Sunday, December 25, 1983 - North Shore News

strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

THE POWER OF MONEY is something that
should never be underestimated. It is probably the
single most useful natural resource in the world,
not counting air, water and that sort of thing.

The way money shapes
people’s experience of life is
profound.

This came home to me
some time ago in a crowded
street in Tokyo’s Ginza
District. It was just before
the subways shut down at 11
o’clock.

Back home at this hour, |
knew, the streets would be
empty except for a few
clusters of people emerging
from theatres. There would
be a trickle of homeward-
bound traffic from
restaurants, parties, games
and meetings.

In Ginza, the cornucopia
roared.

The walls of entire
buildings were alive’ with
scenes from movies created
by millions of lightbulbs
under the control of a com-
puter. It is quite awesome to
stand underneath a screen
maybe six stories high and
half a block wide.

Everywhere, neon blazed
in a harmless electric fire-
storm that I’m positive must
be visible on Mars.

The really big difference
was that while there = are
maybe a dozen or two dozen
brands available to choose
from when it comes to any
particular consumer item in
Vancouver, in Tokyo there
are probably two hundred
competing brands!

Rather than being a nation
of bland look-ahkes, as racist
stereotypes imply, the
modern Japanese in fact are
able to differentiate
themselves from one another
to a far greater extent than
we are able to today over
here.

The Ginza wonderland ot
consumerism extended = for
hundreds of miles in every
direction, it seemed And this
Is NOU quite as cxaggerated as

you might think. It takes a
subway running at nearly 90
miles an hour almost that full
hour to get from Narita Air-
port to the centre of Tokyo,
near the Imperial Palace.

And every street is busy!

The contrast with ‘‘sleepy’’
Vancouver was striking, of
course. But the contrast with
London, England, which 1
had visited a few months
before, was not only striking,
it was frightening.

As Tokyo writhed in the
ecstasy of buying, London
had sunk half-way back into
the Thames Valley swamp
land from which it had
emerged a thousand years
before. Skinheads shambled
out of the Underground
stations.

Buildings were boarded
up. Ruins stood everywhere
— the great sooty pile of the
remnants of the first In-
dustrial Revolution.

In the United States, one
can judge the national cash
flow situation by the decay-
ing urban landscapes. While
there are pockets of elegance
and ostentation, for every
suburb with swimming pools
and hot tubs, there are hun-
dreds of streets where
newspapers blow like carrion
birds along gutters clogged
with broken glass.

Wealth that used to flow
into England and the United
States now flows — _ or
rather, howls — through the

COVER
PHOTO

WHILF. keeping a ctose

watch out the window for
Santa Claus, eight year
old) Olivia Lohan was
photographed by Terry
Peters.

BOXING DAY
BEGINS OUR

JANUARY SALE
Mon, Dec, 26th

up To 50% ort

MENS FINE CLOTHING, ACCESSORIES AND SHOES

| — i — i ee —— | ——

GENTLEMEN’S APPAREL

1050 WEST PENDER

+ 683-2457

(around the comer on Pender from the Bentall Centre) [basal

Where the money is

economies of the successors
to the old industnial giants.

Hong Kong, as well as
Tokyo, pulses with purchas-
ing power. And Singapore.
And, so I am told, Seoul.

Yet in Paris, the crowds in
the shopping districts at night
are even more sparse than
they are in Vancouver.

And behind the Iron Cur-

Sates Associate

tain, of course, people line up
for basic necessities.

Money. I used to think
there was something vaguely
wicked about it. Or at least
shameful. A religious hang-
up, no doubt stemming from
St. Paul’s much-
misinterpreted line about the
fove of money being the root
of all evil, which is quite dif-
ferent than money itself be-
ing bad.

What is bad, is lack of
money. It deals terrible blows
to the quality of one’s ex-
istence. Just thought I'd let
you know that money hasn’t
exactly vanished from the
world, like you might have
thought. It’s just gone, an
awful lot of it, somewhere
else.

Judi Kelter

Michee! Zarzyck!
Sates Associate

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2. gb
on — ~—e

in the New Year

Daniel, le Chocolat Belge
Park Royal South

925-2213

1018 Deep Cove Rd.
North Vancouver