Lonely Planet Tokyo (Lonely Planet Tokyo)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
They don't come any cooler than Tokyo. By turns hi-tech, lo-fi, conventional and outrageous, Tokyo is a city that shouldn't work but does. Promenade with the goths of Harajuku, feast your eyes on the blazing lights of Ginza, and unwind in an intimate izakaya. For a city as stylish as Tokyo, you need a smart and streetwise guide. This is it.
• INDULGE YOUR APPETITE in the finest local restaurants with our Japanese food chapter
• CATCH THE BULLET TRAIN with confidence, with 11 detailed color maps, and routes and prices from Akihabara to Ueno Zoo
• DO THE SHINTO SHUFFLE with walking tours to temples and shrines, gardens and palaces
• PICK UP THE PULSE of the city with our entertainment listings and City Life chapter
• REFRESH YOUR SENSES with easy day-trips to onsen, temple towns and the famed Mt Fuji
From the Publisher
Introducing Tokyo
When you first step off the Yamanote Line, you'll find a tangle of sounds and stars and telephone wires. Iridescent tiles on a nearby building will glisten, and bells and whistles will filter through the din of the crowd as the automatic sliding doors of a pachinko parlour half a block away open and close intermittently.
If it's morning, which it probably is if jetlag nudged you awake with the birds, you'll be swarmed on all sides by some of the 20 million people who are on their way to somewhere - quickly, quickly. They will be from one of Tokyo's 23 wards or from suburbs that are featureless or beautiful. They will be bank presidents or janitors or children in school uniforms. They will be patient but a little tired, knowing that come evening they will retrace their steps and reverse their routes - if you happened to be standing in the same spot, you'd be moved back onto the train with them, swept and rolled by an incredible wave.
If you're lucky enough to spend a few more days here, you'll realize that all this madness is as predictable as a lunch bell, and that it's only the surface of this wonderful city, which has as many bars with booths and soft cushions as it does karaoke machines. This is Tokyo's exquisite complexity - a horn in your ear and a hand on your shoulder, the knowledge that you can, if you choose, be alone in any crowd, but if you drop your wallet, three strangers will pick it up.
But there's no time to consider this. You're off into the city, pulled by the escalators and jostled by anonymous elbows. Tall buildings appear, each one a stack of activity marked by a sign to be read from top to bottom, a sign that may be composed of several spiny scripts and perhaps decorated with a patch of English. A few more steps and you happen upon two rust-red wooden posts separated by a few car's lengths and joined high above by a cross-beam of the same color. A neighborhood shrine in the middle of all this? You walk beneath the torii (gate to the shrine) and up to a small weathered structure where everything is quiet except for the well-fed cats who live under the wooden steps. Miraculously, in a city of millions, no-one seems to be around.
You leave and, as you go to step back onto the street, you forget to look to the right and are nearly run over by an old man riding a bicycle at breakneck speed while puffing on a cigarette. Slowing as he's just past you, he turns around to make sure you're okay, then laughs and pedals on.
This is just 20 minutes, a beginning. There are stairs up ahead on the corner, just across from the chestnut stand, that lead down to the subway. These could take you to a train that carries you back to the station where you started. Or like a magic rabbit hole, it could transport you to other neighborhoods where sumo wrestlers eat lunch or grandmothers buy rice or shops sell plastic spaghetti and sushi. And all of this says that Tokyo is about possibility, the real reason more than a quarter of Japan lives here. Though fire and earthquake and economic recession occasionally threaten the well-being of the city, there are steps up ahead, there's someplace else to go - quickly, quickly.
Lonely Planet Tokyo (Lonely Planet Tokyo),Kara Knafelc,Lonely Planet Publications,1740594509,Asia - Japan,Guidebooks,Tokyo (Japan),Travel,Travel - Foreign
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