Hitoshi Matsumoto, a popular Japanese comedian has often talked about the “Theory of Plus-Minus-Zero” in his radio show.
For example, it is certainly a “plus” for actors to become famous, but on the other side of the coin, they will no longer be able to walk publicly on the streets or publicly go on a date, and become victims of internet defamation… clearly the opposite can happen as well. The better the “plus” is, the risk of the opposite happening also becomes larger at the same time.
I often think about this theory when I think about the ways of traveling.
To travel, is to connect distant “spaces” with “time”. (Many kinds of media exist because of this.) To begin with, I would like to consider the aspect of “time” when we travel.
It takes 1.5 hours to travel from Tokyo to Nagoya on shinkansen (bullet train) on the Tokaido, and a few hundred years ago it took around 10 days to walk. It was a lot faster to travel on horse. In modern days, it takes only around 7 hours on shinkansen from Tokyo to the southern-most station, “Kagoshima Central Station”, and 4.5 hours from Tokyo to the northern-most “Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto Station”. On ferry, it takes fully 2 days from Tokyo to Okinawa, and 2 days to get to Ogasawara Islands. However, there are also LCCs recently that connects everywhere in Japan in around 1-2 hours on a low budget. (But in the case of Ogasawara Island, there is no airport and it is only accessible by ferry…)
But, let’s think about the ways of traveling using the “Theory of Plus-Minus-Zero” like I mentioned in the beginning…
For example, “walking” – the most simple way of traveling may be seen as a “minus” factor when we consider “speed”, but the amount of “information” that we get from seeing different landscapes and people might be so much more that it is incomparable to the amount that we receive when we take the shinkansen or take the plane. There are unlimited possibilities to the discoveries in the little things we find on the way or in the landscapes we see when we travel slowly. Sometimes we can get more information from traveling slowly. On top of that, unlike driving on a car, it is impossible to stop the shinkansen even if we find something interesting from the train window, and most of the time we just have to give up on looking further.
It is common to travel in a straight line when you go to a certain destination for work, and usual to find the faster way to travel, but it might be a good idea to drop the speed when you travel to an unknown place. Instead of looking at your smartphone and computer, it is much better to enjoy the live information and new encounters that catches our sight in order to discover new things.
