What is a neighbourhood? Georges Perec, that dramatist of everyday places, described it as “that part of the town you don’t need to go to; precisely because you’re already there.”
It’s perhaps not real history or community but Tokyoites’ suppressed longing for both of these that the East Side best represents.
The inside of a Tokyo Metro train has seven facing seats, usually occupied, thus it’s possible to form any theory of the city expressible as a fraction of seven.
Tokyo was, after all, too big to comprehend. You could only stay sane by screening out most of it. If the Olympics could be successfully hidden anywhere, it was here.
The imaginary greenscape known as the vertical garden city exists mainly in the naming conventions of real-estate developments.
From signifier of modernity to ugly ubiquity, from strange comfort to international embarrassment, the utility pole is a staple of the Tokyo streetscape.
It’s become the fashion to either love or hate Murakami. He’s either the cat’s meow or something unpleasant on your doorstep.
You’ve heard Tokyo described as a vortex city, with the interesting stuff on the central edges swirling around an empty centre. That makes you slightly wary of Nagatacho.
Tokyo has a rich store of urban legends. These ten tales will make your skin crawl, your toes curl, and your fingers do that weird cracking thing.
“Tomorrow I’m taking the bus,” you said. And if they were a certain type of person, they knew exactly what you meant.
In Tokyo, legend has it that the streets have no names. But some do, even if the name was only added later for marketing purposes.
The Great Kanto Earthquake swept entire communities into the sea and toppled Asakusa’s 68m-high Ryōunkaku, or Cloud-Surpassing Pavilion, the Skytree of its day.
I mention that I’ve come from Setagaya. “Oh, Kinuta?” she says hopefully, making it clear that she really does see the city as one giant map of incinerators.
Having an expert eye for what’s good in many categories, from stationery to coffee grinders, is preferable to displaying idiosyncratic tastes. Or worse, not caring at all.
In the all-depending city, everyone leaned on someone. Amae was the sweetness that powered all these relationships. It was an erasure of the self in exchange for a duty of care.
Whether you first heard city pop in your Seoul bedroom, your Melbourne apartment or your London suburb, it’s no surprise that you recognised something in its mood.
Other cities besides Tokyo can be wonderful in many ways, but they always seem lacking in one department: the stationery department.
Not a lot happens in Aruku Hito (The Walking Man) but anything that does is loaded with enormous significance.
Radiating outwards from the centre were eight linear cities. In each one, life had a different colour, a different typeface, a slightly different logic to it.
The unfussy attitude to all things toilet-related in Japan is experienced first as something surprising, then as something humorous, and finally as something wise.
© David Willoughby 2025