Lewis Waits for Sushi (A Tokyo Story, Part Two)

We woke up late, groggy and discombobulated, after a night out at Vent in Tokyo. The place was interesting and all, with its audiophile soundsystem, its concrete monoliths, its orderly drinks queues and its unexpected houseplants. On the other hand, I’ve never really liked minimalism, or techno music and its many bastard offspring, and the whole place took itself a tad seriously for my taste. It was an experience worth having, I reckon, but probably just the once.

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Metropolis 一番 (A Tokyo Story, Part One)

Up to this point, it may have escaped your notice that Tokyo is quite big.

Depending on how you count, the city has anything from thirteen million to thirty-eight million people, which means that the hair-splitting of urban geographers can add or subtract the entire population of Australia. When Tokugawa Ieyasu chose the site as the headquarters of his new eastern lands, Edo (now Tokyo) was a small fishing village, but it ballooned quickly; a hundred years later it was probably the biggest city on Earth, a title it’s held on and off since then.