Around Tsukuba

Science City (2.0)

The outskirts, leading off the Tokyo Expressway, look like the streets of any other Japanese city - shopping centres, neon lights, compact housing, izakayas and the odd Pachinko palour. Yet, this betrays the essence of Tsukuba. Tsukuba is not your everyday city - it is Japan's science city.

It is a university city, created thirty years ago out of the former Tokyo University of Education. The humanities departments of the old uni remained in Tokyo - the busy streets and turning world of the globe's largest city remained their natural home. The science departments moved north, to Tsukuba and a former rural landscape became a ready made city.

Tsukuba is a planned city and a pleasant city. The outskirts may give evidence of the shifted rural communities, but the subsidised university apartments and North American style suburbs converge together in a network of public parks, tree-lined pedestrian thoroughfares and cycle lanes. In Tsukuba all roads lead to the centre, and from there to the university. It begins as science instutes and government research centres lead out of the residential areas along a wide boulevard with the conference suites to follow. The Tsukuba Space Centre, the National Insitute of Material Science, Advanced Institute of Industrial Science Technology and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency - TSC, NIMS, AIIST and JAXA for short. To the cyclist, Tsukuba becomes a city of acronyms.

And to the cyclist the city becomes a lesson in abstraction. Cycle lanes interlock the different areas through parks and high-arching bridges. With the elevation above the traffic and streets below, there is a sense of detachment from the everyday. On the cycle lanes the city becomes distinct, clinical and clean. It becomes the science city - it is a million miles from Tokyo (corporate, cultural, historic, downtrodden and seedy Tokyo) and a million miles from the countryside, although its next to the former and built on the latter.

Tsukuba is a science city and a planned city and it sometimes feels like the mechanics of it could become all too much - even the cicadas, sounding out the last moments of their lives in the trees sound programmed. I can imagine a dozen Dostoevskian dramas being played out, where the rigidity and mathematical rigour of the city becomes overbearing and inescapable, where the abstract suddenly turns absurd and chaotic.

But this is not St. Petersburg, and there are no skyline church spires - or temples or shrines - to guide the way. And there are no hidden saints, only suited Mormons at the campus and a Southern Baptist in the centre, handing tracts out that he can't read. "I'm a mercenary" he says, a freudian slip in the sticky heat of the Japanese summer.