I took a trip down to Tokyo yesterday for a meeting with a company about some dating-sim games. As usual, it was nice to get down to the city and feel the urban chaos all around me, and engage in one of my favorite activities, people watching. Whenever you go from my home prefecture of Gunma into Tokyo — a 100 km journey which takes about 45 minutes on the fast Shinkansen train — you notice a few differences. First of all, everything in Tokyo is smaller and more cramped, and even the tables in Starbucks are about 40% narrower than what I’m used to. People in Tokyo are much more fashionable, of course, and walking around Shibuya is like being transported into an issue of FRUiTs or Kera, and it can be hard not to openly gawk at all the hip people who pass you on the street. Tokyo is an interesting city to compare with other world capitals — for one thing, although it holds 12 million people, it’s one of the cleanest cities in the world. Although Tokyo does have its attraction, it can be quite a tiring place to spend the day, and I’m usually glad to take the train back home, where the population density is much less than 5500 people per square km.
Tokyo is the center of fashion and culture in Japan. But then you knew this already.
