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Featured Destination: Tokyo, Japan

Text by Kim Hye-jin, photos by Park Jung-hoon

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The city is quiet at night. So quiet it’s almost desolate. The crowds of neckties and black briefcases that pour off the commuter trains in the morning recede at sunset like an ebbing tide. What makes a city a city? What makes Tokyo, Tokyo? Is it the people that fill it? Or is it the soaring skyscrapers staging their dramatic architectural display? In Tokyo, where respect and consideration are highly valued, you come face to face with the principle of coexistence.

What You’ll Find in Tokyo Tokyo means “the Capital in the East.” An obscure fishing village named Edo became the power base of the Edo Shogunate in 1590 and changed its name to Tokyo when it became the capital of Japan in 1868. as a capital (replacing the ancient capital city of Kyoto) Tokyo has a history of about 130 years. Yet it covers a spectrum more dynamic and diverse than any capital city of the world. And in this chaotic diversity, hovering on the brink of disorder and loss of nationality, is found the core of the city’s identity.
Highways entwine around each other, buildings surge up seemingly in disregard to any city plan. The city seems to be built on a wave like the ones of the ocean surrounding the country. Tokyo is also the place where the world’s architects try out their most radical schemes. Where there are slopes, buildings are put up without leveling them. As if riding a rhythm or a wave, the buildings flow above and under the slopes and nothing seems more natural. In neighborhoods where low buildings maintain a modest roofline, towers and skyscrapers leap up to pierce the clouds. Despite this meeting of extremes, the city manages to carry on its life without violent conflict by dint of a tacit consensus that somehow remains unbroken. Yet despite the numerous administrative procedures and painstaking negotiations, the city is constantly changing. The sharp angles of change are rounded off by the Japanese people’s determined effort to carry on an unending dialogue between the old and the new. Faced with the uncertainly of the city’s future, which no one can know in advance, their attitude is one of expectation and readiness.
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Dialogue of the Old and the New The view of a Japanese city is without straight lines, without symmetrical or parallel placements of buildings. Standing on a street corner in West Shinjuku, you face a forest of gigantic buildings, each positioned at an exquisitely oblique angle to the next. In this workplace of 25,000 people, hotels and skyscrapers thrust aloft, yet they seem to scrupulously avoid each other’s gaze. In parts of the world where the climate is hot and dry, there are generally few forests or other vegetation to block the line of sight, and the bright sun produces sharp shadows. Such is the setting of the pyramids in the desert, or the massive buildings of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, where high temperatures are combined with high rainfall or humidity, the contours and contrasts are softened. This might explain why asymmetrical buildings and structures laid out on an arc are so striking a feature of the urban landscape.
Behind even the most uncompromisingly modern building, flowerpots and flowerbeds that reveal the touch of a human hand await the gaze of a visitor. This undercurrent of Japanese sentiment and order flowing quietly behind the façade of cosmopolitanism and chaos can be baffling to the visitor besotted with the bright lights of the city. It is an endless dialogue between the seen and the unseen a continual conversation between the old and the new. For you and me to coexist, we must recognize the difference between us. This inviolable law of nature flows through every meandering street and subway line of Tokyo. Japan’s subways are notoriously difficult to navigate. The tangled maze of 13 privately operated lines, the hefty fare even for a short journey, and the complicated layout of the exits make Tokyo’s subway system one of the most daunting challenges for the visitor. Yet it is hard to deny that the subway is one of the best places to experience Tokyo.

For a great city to be livable and breathable, it needs not only spacious green parks but also a fully developed web of systems connecting one place with another. The city is crisscrossed by elevated roads built on two or three levels traveled by monorails, shuttle buses and all conceivable forms of mass transport busily ferrying passengers to and fro. Even bicycles are parked alongside every road. What makes it possible for this megalopolis of 12 million souls to survive is that they have learned the means, not just for the convenience of the individual, but also for peaceful coexistence of all.

The city is Alive

At a bar in Shibuya, I put forth the question : Do you love Tokyo? Parisians are inordinately proud of Paris, new Yorkers can’t help loving New York, and are always talking about it. Londoners cannot conceal their pride in their historic city, and Shanghai, where things change by the day, floats on a wave of hope and expectation for tomorrow.
Well then, people of Tokyo, do you love your city? You who squeeze into a packed subway car early each morning to ride to work, you who quietly escape the city at the end of the day to lie down in your cramped apartment, you who stroll in Ueno Park with your family or by yourself, or drink with your friends now and then in your regular bar. You, how on weekends, wait your turn outside Tokyo Disneyland, or get swept in the throng of pilgrims to the great department stores and shopping arcades of Shibuya. Or you who gaze at a sculptor’s original model of the Statue of Liberty that stands across the sea in America, or the Tokyo Tower, resembling the Eiffel Tower in Paris, lit up brilliantly at night. Do you love Tokyo?

Glass in hand, you smile softly. What makes a city, a city, you reply, is not just the things you can see, but things hidden from view. The city is a living thing. When you can see, amid the pervading chaos, the underlying respect, consideration and the recognition of differences, then you are ready to say that you love Tokyo.
In Asakusa, where the spirit of Edo lives on, if you see no more than commercialized tradition, you are seeing only half the truth. It is in the back-alleys, where old shops continue the family business of traditional foods, and where hundreds-of years old houses quietly stand, the true spirit of the city remains proud behind the glittering hi-tech revolution. Wander around the second-hand bookshops of Jinbocho, cradle of Japan’s intellectual giants, and you’ll catch a scent of the country’s solid intellect. The Japanese economic mindset, which turns a need into an idea and an idea into a product, is encountered face to face in the shopping heaven of Tokyu Hands, other department stores, and open-air markets that crowd the city center in Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Ginza. Tokyo is a city that energetically embraces its inheritance amidst ceaseless changes and evolutions. No one can be sure of the city’s future. But the people of Tokyo are sure of their belief in their respect for chaos and variation as the means of coexistence with differences. They see their city as a living, breathing organism. They rest their hopes on its boundless potential for creativity.

Kim Hye-jin is an editor of ASIANA culture. Park Jung-hoon is a photographer of ASIANA culture.

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