tokyocity – Exposing The World

Tokyo: The Largest City

A City Talking Off

At this time, in the mid-Seventies, Tokyo was already the largest city in the world at thirty million population, and was rapidly developing as an industrial and technical hub.

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No zoning

The strict separation of usage familiar in American cities does not exist in most parts of Tokyo. Though different parts of Tokyo are known for entertainment, shopping and other specific usages, there is broad license to mix real estate types in local neighborhoods. This is the view from an office window in Toranomon (“Tiger Gate”) district

**The haunting call of the hot-potato vendor is an autumn fixture in Tokyo**

**Small in-town houses with living space above the store are a common sight**

**Pedestrian overpasses are common on major streets, but are seldom integrated with surrounding buildings**

**Finding an address on the map at each *chome*, or city neighborhood.Because houses are numbered in the order built in a home, you have to look the location up.**

**A pachinko parlor. This arcade game is a Japanese take on pinball.**

**Old boats are parked one urban canals**

**Without zoning; houses, stores and factories have to learn to grow up together by lintimate ocal agreement**

Surface trains ride high on viaducts. Grade crossings are rare.

A public mailbox, with frequent collection times posted

**Nobody jaywalks in Tokyo. When the light changes, a tide of humanity breaks forth onto these wide crosswalks.**

**Tokyo Tower is a half-scale imitation of the one in Paris**

When you want lemons, you go to a lemon shop. There is only one supermarket in the whole city, catering mostly to expatriates. In a city of people on foot, nobody wants to cary a week’s worth of groceries home.

**A train roars by above one of the smaller entrances to Shimbashi Station**

**Kinokuniya, the largest bookstore in town, carries all languages**

**This Sambo’s Game Corner uses racist imagery that has fallen out of use everywhere else**

**Bicycle patrols are much more common than police cars, and are able to reach into streets too narrow for cars**

**Red coin phones were for local calls only; other colors were for longer distances.**

**Outdoor dining on a pedestrian-only weekend day**

**Commercial architecture strange and rare. Decades later, Tokyo would set the tone for new cities on the Chinese mainland..**

**Hand-painting a movie poster! This one advertised “Jaws.”**

**Though Christmas is not an element of any local religious observance, the secular holiday is observed by every commercial retailer – and not just for tourists.**

**Cemeteries are oases of peace in the big city**

Tokyo by night

Night views of Asakusa temple district after bon, the summer Festival of Ancestors.

**Many smaller restaurants use plastic models of their dishes to entice customers. There is a special district in Tokyo, *Kappabashi*, dedicated to making these replicas.**

**This is the tenant directory in an office building**

**The front side of Shinjuku Station, largest and busiest in the world. Today it served 4 million passengers a day, has 16 rail lines, 35 platforms andmhas 200 entrances.**

**Rooftop shrines on some large department stores offer tranquility in the urban environment**

**For Americans, a familiar spot with unfamiliar fast food**

Tokyo in winter

Tokyo winters are for the most part cool and rainy, with only occasional frost. But a snow day transforms the city.

**These are the close-packed roofs of homes**

Mass transit

Tokyo has one of the world’s largest subway networks. In the Seventies it still ran on paper tickets for single rides, as well as monthly commuter passes. Today, apps run everything.

**Long underground passageways, often lined with shops, radiate from subway stations to keep people out of the perennially bad weatehr**

**At ech \ station, intricatemaps describe the local neighborhood.**

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