The glass-walled entrance to Tokyo Midtown is a little plain

Tokyo Midtown, located in Akasaka, Tokyo, always seems to be empty whenever I visit. I rarely visit, but when I do, there is always a relaxed atmosphere in the building, and I can walk around the Galleria at my leisure.

Galleria is an Italian word for a roofed shopping street or pedestrian street. In layman's terms, it is an arcade, but I guess they didn't want to use the word "arcade" in the fashionable Midtown. Here, the four-story shopping mall with three floors above ground and one below is called Galleria.

Standing in the corridors of the Galleria, I was convinced to some extent that the shopping mall and the Panopticon, a system of prisoner surveillance, are the same thing. It is true that, due to the atrium structure, it is easy to see the stores on the other floors and to see the shoppers walking around. This may make it look like a panopticon that allows a small number of people to monitor a large number of people.

However, the high visibility in shopping malls is to control the migratory behavior of shoppers who come to the mall, while in prisons, of course, it is to make it easier to monitor the behavior of inmates. At first glance, they look similar, but their philosophies are completely different. As I looked around, I wondered not so much whether shopping malls and panopticons are the same as each other, but rather why the dungeon-like basement of Shibuya station was not transformed into such a highly visible form.

Comment via

日本語