A displacement in time
In my childhood home, a collection of oriental, wood-carved chairs was the centrepiece of my living room.
They were made of expensive wood, and the backrest was hand carved into intricate bird and flower shapes. Under our dining table, which was placed flush against the backrest of the chairs, I would peek through the spaces between tiny bird and flower carvings and spy on the daily happenings of the household. It was both a special home theatre and a secret fort.
The chairs had been a wedding gift from my dad’s parents. My mum absolutely hated them.
For a start, they didn’t quite fit the rest of home. Their “oriental-ness” was stark against the marble floors and decidedly modern furnishings. Also, the chairs were a nightmare to clean. I remember how my mum had to stick her finger through a cloth and painstakingly swivel her finger through the intricate shapes of the backrest to get rid of the dust.
Nobody cried when we retired the chairs for a chic, leather sofa.
I believed I’d retired this heavyset character from my childhood until I stumbled upon a used bookstore in Tokyo. The signboard reads Okurumae Shobo, or Kurumae bookshop. Crammed between an izakaya and a ramen eatery, the store looks displaced in time. Said to be established in World War II, with its peeling paint and an aged wooden frame reinforced by metal, it appears to be crumbling under the weight of its history.
The space is packed from floor to ceiling with antiquated books and magazines, old Japanese toys and prints, and documents dating back to the Meiji or Taisho period. To navigate the labyrinth of books, one has to have the patience of a monk and the agility of a ninja.
Okurumae Shobo helped to unearth the long-forgotten wooden chairs from my childhood. But instead of retiring the old and inconvenient, Japan appears to have mostly kept pieces of its heritage, preserving a constellation of ancient artefacts across its modern landscape.
In my home of land-starved Singapore, skylines are transformed every turn of the decade. Historic buildings have been torn down to make way for houses, malls and roads. The Pearl Bank apartments, once the tallest residential building and a local icon since 1976, was torn down in 2020 to build new housing. The Old National Library Building was demolished in 2004 to give way to a tunnel. Old National Theatre, where the Bee Gees once performed, was torn down in 1986 to make space for a highway.
Even the resting places for the dead have not been spared. Bukit Brown cemetery, which has about 100,000 graves dating from the Japanese occupation, was exhumed to make way for a new highway.
In modern-day Singapore, there seems to be no place for strange old bookshops and wooden chairs that take too much effort to clean. When I told my Singaporean friends about the old Kurumae bookshop, a common response was “cool”, “interesting” and “this wouldn’t have survived in Singapore.”
These demolition projects weren’t without resistance. People formed petitions, conservation groups and activists wrote to protect these spaces, but eventually, these iconic buildings still made way for newer urban projects.
At some point, I have become quite desensitised from reading news about the end of yet another piece of history. Surely it made sense to remove graves to build homes for actual living persons.
An engine optimised for efficiency
Imagine browsing in a secondhand bookstore, fingers deftly sliding across the bumpy spines of books before coming across an interesting title or synopsis. Exploring Japan through the lens of a visitor feels a bit like that. As I wandered the streets of Shinjuku, Ameyoko, and Kamakura, sometimes I’d switch off Google maps and indulge in spontaneous exploration. I had stumbled across several shops that sold delightful knick-knacks, cute prints, and handmade goods this way. There were no big sign boards advertising the shops, only a tiny arrow painted on a brick by the corner of the street, or a little printout stuck onto the wall by a hidden alleyway. It was common to spot a shrine from the Edo period, or a heritage building from the early Showa era between modern office buildings and restaurants. Every corner seemed to unveil a surprise.
In Singapore, there are hardly any hidden alleyways or buildings that feel out of place. Urban exploration feels like the antithesis of serendipity. Every neighbourhood is precisely situated around amenities – one would be hard-pressed not to find a supermarket, bank or some form of public transport within a 10-minute walk from any residential estate. A train breakdown could even make headline news. Instead of browsing a secondhand bookstore, it feels more like browsing the Kindle e-library with the search engine fully optimised for maximum convenience.
This pursuit of organised perfectionism also comes into play in Singapore’s selection of the parts of heritage that are worth remembering. When the Golden Mile Complex, considered an icon from Singapore’s 1970s-era brutalist movement, was planned for redevelopment in 2019, there was online chatter that Singapore was removing old buildings that didn’t fit the character of the glass and steel aesthetic of the central business district, or the beautifully restored shophouses and British Colonial architecture.
When our environment and lives are primed for peak optimisation, there is little wonder why our value systems are tied to productivity and redundancy.
Time flows differently in Singapore. There is little buffer time to account for missteps. There is comfort in knowing exactly what to expect. And yet, the simple joy of an unexpected encounter, the discovery of something unplanned, and the magic of spontaneity is lost.
A shape-shifting beast
The past two years, I have been shuttling between work in Dubai and home in Singapore. Home is a shape-shifting beast. Each time I returned, parts of my neighbourhood and the people around me would evolve. Quite literally, within the realm of my bedroom, my mum would organise my things in new storage boxes and cupboards. In my neighbourhood, a new sports hall and swimming complex now stand in place of greenery. When I visit the malls, shops that I remember are no longer there.
As the world transforms, we, too, shape-shift to find our place. It is easy to get swept up by the changing currents and justify our choices made to “keep up with the times”. We update our phone models almost annually to keep up to speed with technology, and we’ve convinced ourselves to enroll in data analytics and artificial intelligence courses to remain employable.
More acutely, time has left its tracks on my aging parents. My mum’s facial treatments can lighten her liver spots, but her body is no longer the same. My dad’s dye jobs keep his hair dark, but his wrinkles and laugh lines betray his age.
Growing up in Singapore has instilled in me a penchant for efficiency and structure. This has made living abroad frustrating, especially when things don’t go to plan because of train delays or slow responses from government or banking services. But lately, I have wondered if this impatience is a result of being spoiled by Singapore’s far-sighted urban blueprint.
Between Japan’s gentle preservation of its heritage and Singapore’s breakneck pace for progress, there have been intentional trade-offs being made about which memories to preserve.
Once, I took a bus route past my childhood neighbourhood and was thrust into a trip down memory lane. My primary school had a fresh coat of paint. The playground where I used to frequent was demolished. My old apartment building was now brown and no longer blue. Part of me marvelled at how snapshots of my growing up years – memories that I believed were carefully folded and tucked away for good – had resurfaced easily at the spark of something once known. The other part felt an uneasy twinge at how time has chipped away at the once-familiar.
A third, yawning part was a little spooked by how easily these changes have rolled right off my shoulders.
It seemed inefficient to dwell on things. I didn’t dwell when we got rid of the chairs that had been my secret fort; I didn’t dwell when we moved out of my childhood home; and I didn’t dwell when I realised, while away, what I had missed about the people and places touched by time.
And yet now, as I think of the child, who had once peered through the back of a wooden chair and saw the world in a different way, I wish someone could tell her: don’t worry, take your time.
Cover photo provided by the author