Beyond the Window: The Hands That Raise the Tag
Column 'Beyond the Window,' installment 4: reading the article about Window 5's marketplace crowd raising tags, the editor-in-chief recalls the day, as a rookie reporter in 1975, he covered the intake camp for the first Drifters.
Reading this morning's article about Window 5, an old memory came back. In 1975, as a rookie reporter, I covered the day the first Drifters were moved to the intake camp. Outside the camp wall, a crowd of neighbors who had no idea what was happening gathered, and someone waved a piece of cloth over the wall. No one knew whether anyone on the other side noticed. They waved anyway. More honestly: they couldn't help waving.
Hearing that the Survey Division had used the phrase "signs of awareness" for the first time, I found myself digging up an old notebook from back then. I won't say the feelings of the residents waving cloth on this side of the wall half a century ago are the same as those of the market crowd raising tags on the other side of the window. I couldn't possibly say that. But I think both shared the same shape: moving your hands without knowing whether it will ever reach anyone.
Running a newspaper means putting out a day's work every morning without knowing whether it will reach anyone, or what they'll make of it if it does. In that one-way sense, our own work may not be so far from theirs. With that thought, I sit at my usual desk today, sharing a teacup with Yurari, writing the next piece.
