TOKYO RISING

Japan’s ultramodern, bustling capital can make New York look like a sleepy backwater. Tokyo is back—and busier than ever following the country’s long economic slump.

Think Las Vegas meets Disneyland, add more than 12 million people, and you’ll have a vague idea of what Tokyo is like. The Japanese capital is a city of breathtaking scale and inimitable, spellbinding contrasts, a place that seems more like an endless sci-fi movie set than a bricks-and-mortar urban landscape where real people eat, sleep and pack into trains everyday for the office commute. The core of the world’s largest metropolitan area (35 million souls), Tokyo proffers a riot of neon and futuristic facades that can give way to a quiet Shinto shrine and generations of traditional culture, if you simply turn a corner.

Gazing down at this bayside megalopolis from atop Kenzo Tange’s colossal twin spires that serve as city hall, you can see the lights stretch from horizon to horizon, almost to the foot of snow-tipped Mt. Fuji, 62 miles away. The vast expanse of endless egg-carton buildings boggles the mind—Tokyo only begins to make sense at street level. Rebuilt from the ashes of World War II, it spreads out from the Imperial Palace, home to Japan’s elderly emperor and empress and the former site of Edo Castle, the largest fortress of the premodern world. Repeatedly devastated by disasters since samurai top dog Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his capital in 1603, modern Tokyo’s roots can still be appreciated at the festive Sensoji Temple and the spectacular Kabuki theater, or simply by strolling through the old-fashioned neighborhoods of Shitamachi along the Sumida River.

Ever protean and always surprising, Tokyo refuses to be confined to the past, present or future. A city of surfaces and hidden interiors that is profoundly un-Western, Tokyo is a high-energy, super-dense, sensory overload trip into Japan’s modern heart. It can never be fully understood, but a taste always leaves visitors wanting more.

Required reading

• Yearning for yen in Tokyo? by Dean Foster