Growing up in rural South Wales, I thought Cardiff was big, London enormous but this is a different beast all together. This is Tokyo!
Over 33 000 000 people living in an area almost seven times the size of London — it is a city almost incomprehensible in magnitude and there is no avoiding the sense that there is no end to the urban jungle. As an outsider with only two words of Japanese, navigating the sprawling metro system is immensely difficult and finding places becomes a daunting task. Japanese cities do not have street names, addresses are presented rather as a series of numbers indicating city ward, district, block and building number, making Google-free navigation effectively impossible.
The enormity of Tokyo’s population is typified by the iconic Shibuya crossing, a furiously busy crossroads in the cities largest shopping district. Crowds swell on the pavements, a sense of anticipation spreading through the revellers, each watching the countdown until the lights simultaneously turn red, the little green man sets them loose and hundreds of people flood the crossings. There is something wonderfully exhilarating about this mighty rush, a feeling of mutual vitality contrasted with mutual insignificance.
The bright lights and advertising robots of Shibuya may be novel but for me, the city only truly comes to life when you dive into the infinite network of alleys sheltering all manner of delights. The fabulously small noodle restaurants of Kanda with seating for fewer than ten people, the sake bars of Golden Gai, hidden away at the top of a lightless set of stairs — that’s the Tokyo pleading to be explored.
Japan is renowned for its culinary intricacies and the cultured palette of its cuisine and, true to form, it is seemingly impossible to purchase a bad bowl of ramen in Tokyo. Being a lover of all things fishy, I found the world famous Tsukiji fish market enthralling. I couldn’t help but feel ignorant as I walked the alleys and stalls, gazing at fish (some were potentially vegetables…) I had never so much as heard the names of. On offer was a staggering array of crabs and lobster, tuna and salmon, seaweed and sea cucumber, mussels and oysters, eel and octopus, sea snail and squid and whale — all as fresh as fish can be.
Nestled among the vendors stalls are the tiniest of restaurants which of course, I couldn’t resist. Who’s to say raw fish isn’t a valid breakfast choice?
I ordered a dish at the recommendation of the chef/waiter/owner — a rice bowl containing toro (the fatty belly meat of a bluefin tuna, sea urchin (specifically the gonads of a sea urchin), scallop, salmon roe, sea eel, yellow tail, salmon, squid and herring roe. I love sushi and I’m not phased by raw fish however, I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than one piece of raw sea urchin genitalia which managed to be both hairy and slimy…
My overwhelming impression of Tokyo was one of a city of two conflicting cultures — the old and the new, the Shinto shrines and the blazing neon. I watched a man pray at a very small shrine ensconced in the hyper modern commerce ward of Chiyoda. The shrine was surrounded on three sides by construction works and was opposite the skyscraper headquarters of a multi national Bank. This is it, this is the contrast, the battle. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the old — Tokyo’s rich heritage — is losing the fight as it becomes increasingly overshadowed by taller, glossier buildings and the inherently spiritual values of the Japanese people, still so evident in the country as a whole are blurred within Tokyo by one too many robot waitresses.
