Toyko

 I love Tokyo
Home of anime
I will travel the world

The 7th special city to become global is the city of Tokyo for many reasons. While Tokyo has been Japan’s most important city for almost 500 years, its rise to world city status was driven by its remarkable recovery from the ashes of the Second World War. Japanese companies and their famously hard-working staff were responsible for an ‘economic miracle’ that by the end of the 1980s had turned Japan into one of the world’s richest nations.

This rise of Tokyo had its echoes in culture, too. Elements of Japanese popular culture, from karaoke to manga comics and sushi bars spread across the globe, while creative products like the Sony, achieved worldwide reputations for the originality and quality of their work. Yet Tokyo remains different from other world cities. It has never been a draw for tourists on the scale of Paris or New York, and it has never had the levels of ethnic diversity or the number of foreign students of a London or Sydney. However, Tokyo has developed a distinctive diversity of its own that takes unexpectedly various forms. Because of its depth, Tokyo’s culture can be hard for tourists and even for the city’s residents to fully grasp.

Tokyo’s particular strengths are One answer lies in the multiple meanings of the Japanese word Bunka (culture): artistic production, but also ‘lifestyle’, ‘quality of life’, and ‘wellbeing’. Tokyo people do not see culture as separate or ‘not for them’: as the city puts it, ‘common citizens have historically been very involved in a rich variety of artistic and cultural activities’. The culture of Tokyo is marked by ‘reciprocal communication and an exceptional level of equality in cultural participation’. There has long been a blurring of the boundaries between consumers and creators, and between what Westerners sometimes call ‘high’ and ‘pop’ culture. In this way, what distinguishes Tokyo culture is the active role that ordinary citizens play as independent actors in cultural activities. There is a cultural element in the lives of many citizens, which forms a rich foundation for Tokyo’s wider culture.

A second great strength of the city is its seamless continuity of tradition and modernity. In Tokyo, the traditional and the modern are linked not only spatially but temporally as well. Many foreigners see the city as an ultra-modern city of skyscrapers, cutting-edge fashion and design, and high-technology. Yet the city remains the most important center for traditional Japanese culture, having preserved its many traditional cultural forms, from ancient shrines and temples to Noh and Kabuki theatres and rakugo performances. Tokyo has several major venues for such art, including the Kabuki-za Theatre, the National Noh Theatre and the Kokugikan Hall in Ryogoku. It is also home to more traditional artisans than any other Japanese city. This concentration of traditional culture is a source of techniques, values, and inspiration for contemporary cultural workers in fields like design and architecture.

A megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of ten million people A megacity can be a single metropolitan area or two or more metropolitan areas that converge. The terms conurbation, metropolis, and metroplex are also applied to the latter.As of 2015, there are 36 megacities in existence. The largest of these are the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Mumbai, Mexico City, Beijing, São Paulo, Jakarta, New York, Karachi, Osaka and Manila: each of these has a population in excess of 20 million inhabitants. Tokyo is the largest metropolitan area, while Shanghai is the largest city proper.

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