Interesting thing about this trip - I think i finally figured out what my aesthetic really is: neomodernism.
Tokyo is really a place where modernity never died - it never gave into the irony or decay of postmodernism and managed to thrive despite the increasing uncertainty of the digital age.
It took a while, mostly because it's basically a wholesale rejection of postmodernity, and the admission that what we know as "contemporary art" may have been entirely a mistake. No way could so many people, effort, and resources be entirely wrong, all at once?
But maybe it can. And we may be reaching that inflection where the truth finally reveals itself.
The big and obvious flaw with postmodernity is that even after all those decades, it never even managed to come up with a name for itself...it symbolizes nothing, it stands for nothing, and leaves you empty after the experience itself. It is an aesthetic that is inherently reactionary and has an expiration date...and that day may have finally arrived.
So it's back to modernism for me. Not serialism or "high" modernism, which was the reason for its downfall to begin with - but good ol' fashioned modernism, where the trains run on time and shit just works.
Neo-modernism is the closest label for that - does that make me a conservative or a radical? Who knows. But it at least stands for something...something that's needed right now - badly.