What is Tokyo like?

Have you been to Tokyo? What is your impression?

Would you like to visit Tokyo one day? What are your expectations?

For the Japanese, Tokyo can be seen as the ‘city of dreams’ associated with opportunity and chance of success whilst others might perceive it as a crowded and polluted city where people are cold.

For visitors from other countries, Tokyo can be the place where they encounter Japanese tradition and/or modern technology.

For others, Tokyo’s pop culture may offer an escape from their reality with never ending and ever changing strange trends and attractions.

Recently, I watched Tokyo episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘A Cook’s Tour’ and then read the book (of the same episodes). The best cure when you’re missing travelling. The episodes are always fun to watch, but following up with the book gives you the extra narrative, a bit more depth to your experience of the places he visited.

The way Anthony Bourdain depicts Tokyo in the book made me incredibly emotional. Mixed with traveller’s fascination and curiosity, in his often cynical and witty writing style, he captures Tokyo’s stillness (and stiffness), beauty and ugliness, excitement and craziness, warmth that some people fail to recognise.

And that loneliness – that deep, faceless, overwhelming feeling that swallows you whole and paralyses you.

I grew up in Tokyo. So for me, it was just ‘home’ for a very long time. It was just where I lived and nothing more or less. However, when I was 16 my family decided to move out of Tokyo – but I decided to stay.

Living alone and making my own living, this is when I discovered the different sides of Tokyo, or should I say, the energy of Tokyo that I hadn’t noticed before. The city is futuristic and orderly and exciting, and it swallows you into a deep sense of total disconnection. It’s a strange kind of melancholy. An extreme loneliness with despair and little patches of beauty, and weirdly satisfying.

I thought Sophia Coppola’s film ‘Lost in Translation’ also portrayed that Tokyo energy beautifully.

The other day, I had the opportunity to answer the question ‘where is your number one place in Japan?’ and I found myself answering ‘Tokyo’ without a second of hesitation.

Tokyo will always be my number one. Not only because it’s a fascinating and fun place to visit, but mainly because of our history; It belongs to me and I belong to it.

I’m sure Tokyo means many different things to different people.

What is Tokyo to you?

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