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As I left my hotel in Tokyo in the mornings I found myself in the world of Koyanisqaatsi: the sole pedestrian at 8.45 walking east to Shinjuku station; bad idea; I did so with great difficulty for I did so abreast a massive and continuous army of office workers walking west. Two million commuters come through Shinjuku Station daily on their way to Tange's City Buildings 1 and 2 and other offices. I envied them their uniformity, their common purpose, their impeccable turnout, the discipline of the phalanxes released, one after another by the pedestrian lights. There was something beautiful, dignified, moving, in their mass will. For who was I, poor tourist, map in hand, and with the leisure to loaf my way round their city? There used to be a scene in films, perhaps when Godzilla or the 50 Foot Woman were sowing mass panic in a city: gesticulating wildly a person would say "You're all going the wrong way!!!" I think the Koyanisquaatsi film liked to think it was saying that; but my respect was for the heroic tide of workers en route for the office rather than for hippy filmmakers telling them off for doing so.

Suspicion of the city crowd has pretty much remained constant throughout the twentieth century. As well as being dangerous, as well as being common the crowd represented alienation, another 'bad thing' of which the city is supposedly culpable. It is a prevailing modern idea that crowds are bad, oppressive, that one should wish to get away from them, to be by oneself. There is the feel that the city crowd creates a kind of anomie, that it is unnatural, artificial, robotic.

This idea sprang from early critiques of the new cities of the industrial age; they were socialistic in origin; above all they were German. Walter Benjamin quotes Engels on the London crowd: "They rush past one another as if they had nothing in common or were in no way associated with one another. Their only agreement is a tacit one: that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement, so as not to impede the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even bothers to spare a glance for the others."
Benjamin points out that London must have been particularly shocking to a writer who came from " a Germany that was still provincial." Heine (as we saw earlier) was another such critic. These earnest provincial Germans hated the crowd of the new, mass cities, feeling probably that the individual could only be lost in it. But the real individual remains himself in the crowd; indeed the crowd defines him. (More sinisterly the crowd is the medium into which we can be sucked..or deliberately allow ourselves to be sucked, like Hannibal Lekter in the closing scene of Silence of the Lambs)

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