Take a walk around Tokyo’s Shibuya and Shinjuku wards today and you will experience first-hand the cityscape that has given Tokyo its reputation as a city of the future: wide-screen electronic billboards, a blur of lights, buildings of glass, metal, and concrete.
If Tokyo looks like a city without a past, it is because this is almost literally the case. The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake and the aerial bombings of World War II have time and time again forced city builders to return to the drawing board. In fact, Tokyo in its current form is mostly the result of the construction boom that began before the 1964 Olympic Games and continued through the speculative economic bubble of the 1980s. If not out of design but of necessity, Tokyo is a city that has constantly evolved.
It isn’t only Tokyo’s skyscape that makes one think of the future. For such a densely populated metropolis, Tokyo is unexpectedly safe and clean, and all the more surprisingly so considering the fact that such an environment is maintained without the intervention of a top-down government, as in the case of Singapore. Tokyo’s recent cultural exports to the world only reinforce the sense of the city’s lack of mooring to any particular history or geography. Take Akihabara for instance, initially famous for its electronics but now equally known for exporting anime and costume play or “cosplay” subculture. The same sense of otherworldliness can be felt in Harajuku, where Goths, Lolita baby-girls, and rockabilly dancers with hairstyles Elvis would approve of peacefully coexist within meters of one of Meiji Jingu Shrine.
At the same time, there are still pockets of Tokyo that have retained a traditional Japanese atmosphere. Asakusa, once the city’s entertainment district, is just one example. Even in Ginza, with its wide lane of modern, luxury brand flagship stores, it is not uncommon for a visitor to encounter a woman in kimono attire. In fact, perhaps it is this clash of the new and the old, the Japanese and the Western, that is found in Tokyo that both intrigues and attracts cosmopolites from all over the world. With the first decade of the 21st century on its way out, can Tokyo continue to live up to Tange’s predictions and fuel the public imagination on a global scale? Or will Tokyo be eclipsed by the rise of neighboring Asian cities like Shanghai and Beijing? Only time will tell.
Posted in 2008-04: First Asia-Europe Young Urban Leaders Dialogue | 20.11.2008
By: Yui Hirohashi
