Sunburned in Tokyo

Beauty as Function

I’m walking around Tokyo with one of the worst sunburns of my life, which feels like a public offense in a city with so many beautiful people and things. My face is an angry tomato among hordes of pearlescent cheekbones, shielded methodically by ruffled parasols. I obtained the sunburn yesterday when I trekked for nine and a half hours through the Japanese Alps, up to Mount Tateyama. It was one of the most physically excruciating activities I’ve ever engaged in, complete with a 4 AM start time and following a guide up a near-vertical, snowy mountain with crampons on my boots and an ice axe in hand. It was a slow burn of a journey, consisting of tiny steps and many breaks. I slammed 7-Eleven snacks with shivering hands and peeled layers on and off as the sun peaked in and out of the clouds intermittently. I was also met with astonishment at every bend in the path, one revealing a landscape of jagged, snowcapped peaks, and another revealing an emerald green lake, tucked below a valley of misty green trees. When we reached our destination - at about 3000 meters above sea level - the Alps sprawled out before me like a board game map. I could see the distant town of Toyama and even the unmistakable conical outline of Mount Fuji on the horizon. Reaching Tateyama’s peak filled me with elation and satisfaction - it’s one of the most impressive things I’ve done to date.

View from Mount Tateyama’s peak

These feelings, however, are slipping to the back of my mind as I paint the city red with my forehead. My Glossier SPF, unsurprisingly, failed me. Worse than that, on the trek I repeatedly wiped my leaky nose with a gloved hand as the cold wind whipped my face incessantly. All this wiping and friction and intermittent sun has caused a rash between my nose and upper lip, which is blistering when it comes in contact with more sun. It’s also deciding not to cooperate under make-up, balling up concealer in clumps and resulting in a papier-mâché-like texture - a flesh-toned mustache. I feel - and frankly, look - disgusting. Even though my battle scars were earned in the name of adventure, they’re rendering me rather self-conscious. I saw some beautiful mountains at Tateyama and am seeing some beautiful people in Tokyo - I can’t help but want to look beautiful too, unfortunately.

Like any young woman raised on Western feminist teachings and the internet at large - and, honestly, any young woman period - my relationship with beauty has been complicated. Beauty has remained a looming storm cloud of sorts, shapeshifting and migrating around my brain space, transforming into something I should chase, I should capture, I should reject. Always ever-present and ever-available to elicit some kind of feeling out of me. I should try to become beautiful to obtain more power in life, seducing the world into granting me privileges like a siren harnessing her song. I should reject beauty altogether if I want to fully commit to being a feminist, only I can’t fully do that, because of the man watching me through the keyhole in my brain, as the widely circulated Margaret Atwood quote stresses. I should discover what makes me uniquely beautiful, leaning into the “quirks” that make me a special individual, maybe even “practice self-love,” rather than waste time chasing some unattainable ideal, but I should still buy products and engage in practices that inch me closer to that ideal. 

I’ve bounced between these different modes of thinking like a pinball in its machine. I’ve implicitly and explicitly explored them - in conversations, in my newsletter, and in my own mind. And each time, I’ve drawn blanks. I’ve ended up with unsettled conclusions because none of these ways of thinking are particularly sustainable for me in the long run. I always end up adopting a critical outlook on myself - on my appearance, on my evaluation of it, and on my evaluation of my evaluation. The thought that’s remained the most comforting to me is that beauty is ultimately a carrot on a stick, and I and the other billions are hopeless, hungry little bunnies that need to hop off our respective treadmills before we crash and burn. As such, I’ve felt most comfort - but not total comfort - in rejecting vanity as much as I can. I don’t bother to conceal my acne as much as I used to. I don’t invest heavily in flattering clothing. I’m increasingly comfortable sitting with my “ugliness” and I’ve often thought that I’m better for it. In some respects, I certainly am.

However, as I travel more, read more, and live a bit more, I’m realizing that the underlying chord in my evaluation of beauty is its self-centeredness. In a truly individualist, capitalist fashion, I often only look at beauty as far as it affects me as an asset or detriment - as it affects my attractiveness as a partner, worker, and society member at large. When I think about beauty, I am thinking about myself, about my vanity. And beauty and vanity aren’t necessarily the same thing. While vanity is almost always concerned with beauty, beauty isn’t always concerned with vanity.

In her article “Against self-analysis,” Hayley Naham posits that we’re all more or less drawn to the “beautiful” in life, but our modern brains - rich with therapy-speak and excessively inward-looking lenses thanks to social media - often chide us for romanticizing matters too much. We caution ourselves to not view life through too rose-tinted of glasses, to not present life online in too dramatized a fashion, otherwise, we’ll lose sight of reality. In response, Naham - and P.E. Moskowitz and Susan Sontag - all suggest that we might be thinking about ourselves a bit too much, to paraphrase an iconic Jemima Kirke Instagram story. Perhaps we view our propensity to favor the beautiful in too critical of a light, trying to make sense out of matters that are purely visceral, that are without the need to make sense completely.

This idea reminds me of a lesson I learned in a college course on the history and theory of photography. For a long time, I thought that all art needed to communicate some kind of deliberate message, or otherwise serve some specific utility. I thought that art needed to tell some kind of alternative story or push back on dominant modes of thinking to be considered “good.” It was in this class that I was first exposed to “art-for-art’s sake” criticism, or considering art purely for its visual attributes, for its use of form, color, line, and so on, to elicit pleasurable feelings in the viewer.

To teach this, my professor had our class analyze Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 1907 photo “The Steerage,” depicting passengers traveling from the United States to Europe via the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II. My professor suggested that a Marxist critic might interpret the photo as illustrating class inequality. The image juxtaposes the cramped, unkempt lower-class passengers on the lower deck with the relaxed, refined passengers on the upper deck - some perhaps venturing to Europe on holiday, while others may have been turned away by U.S. immigration officials. This interpretation came most naturally to me - I was shocked to learn that Stieglitz operated in a different mode. He instead, was most intrigued by the chaotic beauty of the scene, in the leading lines composed by the rope and deck. In the eccentricities of the voyagers and their ensembles, particularly bewitched by a man’s straw hat on the upper deck. In the generally erratic movement present on a bustling boat. He was interested in photography in the way a true modernist is - in capturing the essence of a scene or subject, as purely as a camera possibly can.

“The Steerage” (1907) by Alfred Stieglitz

Since taking this class, this way of thinking about art has colored my interpretation of numerous artworks, particularly more abstract works - those of O’Keefe, Rothko, etc. - that I may not have been able to appreciate as wholly in the past. Purely beautiful work - romantic art, visceral art, what have you - does have a function, it turns out, which is to make people feel. To allow others to bask in beauty and swim in an emotion for a beat longer than they otherwise would is “functional.” It’s, frankly, what makes life worth living.

I consider this again as I stroll through Tokyo with a sunburned, scabbing face. I’ve been in Japan for over a week at this point, and what’s surprised me most about my short visit is how comfortable I feel in the country. There’s no specific reason I should feel uncomfortable, per se, it’s just so far away geographically from the places I call home in the United States. It’s not hard, however, to feel comfortable in the presence of narrow, flower-lined streets, peaceful wooden temples enclosed by lush trees, and with jewel-colored sashimi adorning your plate. It’s easy to feel good in well-made denim. It’s not hard to feel content staring out at the peaks of snowcapped mountains and emerald-green lakes. At the risk of sounding overly romantic (about a country I’ve been in for a week, no less), it’s not hard to release yourself to the clutches of beauty - unassuming, non-self-effacing, easy beauty. People, it turns out, need beauty - in life, further outside their mirrors than they likely think. I almost forget about my sunburn.

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