Today marks the last part of my trip in Japan outside of Tokyo, at least from what is in my plans. The morning in Hakone was rainy and foggy, which added an air of mysteriousness to the way to the Gora station, and then onwards to Shinjuku, in Tokyo, my next and final station in the trip before going back home to Berlin at the end of the next week.
The train on the Hakone line goes through a series of overpasses, strong inclines (the voiceover mentions in Japanese and in English that the trains are equipped with 4x the power of the normal trains, and that the inclines are the highest in Japan and second highest in the entire world) and multiple switchbacks. There were multiple moments in the trip where trains going up the hill were arriving at the other side of a switchback station at the same time as mine, going down the hill. That was impressive to witness.
And the dance of switching train tracks brought me to one of the more interesting sketches from Carlos, in terms of sparking reflections related to tracks and flows - the one that he explored the random Hexagonal Truchet pattern. I thought to extend the truchet pattern with a set of particles, or “trains”, navigating continuously through the patterns, and keeping the interactive nature of the sketch, to make it kind of a toy.
This is also situationally significant with Shinjuku: as the world’s biggest train station, connecting lines from all directions in Japan, and handling a staggering amount of passengers at any given time, it feels like a true “beehive” - buzzing and swirling - and fits and plays with the hexagonal grid that beehives are shaped on.