Trigger Happy
240
7
FALSE IDOLS
Dress code
Chiba City: a sprawling, industrial town in the humid,
rainy Japanese spring, where downbeat pockets of
hardware shops, Pachinko parlors and lean-to noodle
shacks are carved up by multilane highways. Cars don’t
stop to admire the view; they are always going
somewhere else. Usually to the south, to Makuhari,
Japan’s own vision of the future now. Makuhari is a
coastal district reclaimed from the sea and built from
scratch within a decade: lowering steel-and-glass
skyscrapers, webs of swirling concrete walkways, and
acres of space on ground level—liminal expanses of
perfectly clean and geometrically patterned paving that
in Los Angeles would be instantly carved up into
parking lots, but which here have precisely no function
