Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period’s restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it’s surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published in the middle of 2022. While most of Japan’s recent first-time visitors were no doubt content to put together a few Instagram stories and check the Land of the Rising Sun off their “bucket list,” one imagines the more urbanism-minded among them returning home inspired to understand what they saw and experienced of the day-to-day life of Japanese cities — and of no Japanese city more than Tokyo, foreign tourists’ most common starting point.
It hardly needs saying that Tokyo is unlike any capital in the West, and it doesn’t closely resemble any other Asian megacity either. Sheer scale contributes something to its difference — more than 14 million people live within the city proper, and 41 million in the metro area — but more so the sheer functionality it exhibits at that scale. At every level, from its efficient train networks to its countless eateries to its well-stocked convenience stores to its ever-present bottled-drink vending machines, Tokyo appears simply to “work” in a way Westerners no longer even expect from their own cities, even without an apparent guiding intelligence overseeing the process. The reasons behind that hold out enough interest that Emergent Tokyo‘s co-author Joe McReynolds, an American academic with a good deal of experience in Japan, has spoken of originally having intended to write a book called How Tokyo Works.
Read the whole thing at Substack.