Even among the other big cities of Italy, Milan is a busy city that stands at the forefront of commerce and trade, as the north’s leading city. Perhaps because of its high energy, they say that Milan differs somewhat from the typical image of Italy in the minds of the Japanese.
Yet, Milan is an Italian city after all. Everything you see when you first arrive from Japan is different, like the streetscapes you see before your eyes, the way people treat you, the kind of hospitality for sightseers, and so on, which undoubtedly makes for an experience filled with the new.
After you go through the experience of being discomfited by all those differences, humbled by them, and smiling wryly, don’t you then start finding out just how many similarities there are?
For example, even though Italians are Westerners, most have a small build. And so, the shoes and clothes come in sizes that fit Japanese.
The seasons are similar to those in Japan, so Italians have summer and winter clothes in their wardrobes of course, but also the essential in-between clothes for spring and fall, which is exactly the same as in Japan.
The seasons being similar, Italians have that same extremely high level of interest in seasonal foods, and they also want a food lifestyle that is satisfying every day, not only each season.
The various seasons differ, so, the love of nature’s colors changing through the four seasons, not just food, is also alike, and at the same time, there is a similarly high level of interest in the smells of things.
Just these similarities alone. Isn’t that enough?
By the way, there has been a popular trend toward amusements aimed mainly at visual effects at theme parks and events in various countries, thanks to the flourishing of digital technologies in recent years. In Milan too, of course. VR is a typical example.
These last few months in Milan they have been running an event whose main attraction is an immersive experience where you enter into the world of Van Gogh or Monet, just as though you have traveled back in time to the age when they were alive, or to put it in other words, where their painted worlds appear as actual landscapes, and you can be present there in the landscape.
One after the other they are planning all sorts of events that use special effects like this. But it’s amusing the way they are organized, in a sort of homemade kind of way, with the rough edges showing.
For example, the route to the VR venue. It was covered up with partitioning screens as though to hide the places where rubble was piled up and work had stopped, perhaps because the preparation work was not finished, or it had been halted because of lack of money. After walking I don’t know how many kilometers, exposed to direct sunlight, wind, and rain, I came to a disused, now abandoned roadway and a row of abandoned buildings, which gave the place an eerie atmosphere. The place looked so disused that if there hadn’t been any directions to find the place, poor as they were, I would have wondered whether the venue for the VR experience I was so looking forward to really was up ahead or not. It actually seemed more like a good place for a nighttime test of courage.
When I consider that if it had been in Japan they would have arranged for parking, the path to the venue would have been paved, it would have been decorated with bright, colorful PR and advertisements, and they would have designed things to fully heighten your expectations on your way to the venue, I smile wryly at the situation at hand. But, the VR experience, unreal yet perfect, and the reality left full of imperfections, the work unfinished, with the lack of preparation, made for an extraordinary contrast, and that gap was actually the most interesting experience.
