“Walking through Tokyo”: Wackwitz and the liminal spaces of postmodern everyday life

Abstract

This study critically examines the activities and views of the transnational flaneur Stephan Wackwitz, which are described in his essay collection Tokyo. It particularly focuses on the descriptions of liminal spaces, such as streets, shopping malls, game salons, railway stations, and airports, where the author encounters social, cultural, and ethnic boundaries and realizes that the modern hierarchy of the real and virtual is upside down, taboo and normal displaced, and familiar and foreign mixed. This "orderly disorder" is analyzed in this study as a temporary tension that occurs during globalization at the thresholds of the liminal spaces of postmodern everyday life.