東京 (Of Tokyo)

Tokyo isn't big.

It isn't huge or giant.

It is monstrously massive. It is a vast, grey smudge that can be seen from space on the surface of otherwise green-ish Japan.

The distant boundaries of the city are ringed by mountains, and the broad plain between them is almost completely choked with urban development. If you're looking at a satellite photo of the city up close, you're hard pressed to locate any particular area to orient yourself. You're forced to pull back until you can catch where the dense grey of concrete eventually starts to peter out and let in some green. And only by interpolating from this green periphery can you begin to guess at the location of the heart of the metropolis.

So dense and vast is Tokyo that it is easy to think of the thing as some relentless virus of progress: infesting and repurposing the land. Had it not been kept in check by the geographic realities of mountains and ocean, it might have succeeded in sprawling further, eventually transforming the whole of Japan into a single cybernetic network of commuter trains, concrete, and power lines.

If Tokyo is a living thing, then its arteries are the JR and Metro lines that move commuter trains on its surface and beneath its skin. And in these arteries flows blood made up of millions of the black-suited Japanese Sarariman. To try to see something of Tokyo, we piled into the flow of Sararimen and took the circulatory Yamanote line around the city's heart. The names of stations might as well be the names of the metropolis' organs: Shinjuku and Shibuya, Harajuku and Akihabara, Tokyo and Shinagawa. We jumped off and on the train, wandering around these centres, trying to get a feel for what this place was, but our every stop was one more densely developed downtown vista for all of the 30+km of the line.

...and I think that's all I can really say about Tokyo. In our two and a half days in town, we saw barely a fraction of it. I tried to capture some of it on film, mostly to satisfy Sarfaraz's obsession with the lives of cities. Oddly, I took fewer pictures than expected. Here's hoping that I caught something with them.