Tokyo!

Tokyo, the one and only. It’s not one city, but a huge array of subcenters spread across hundreds of square miles, together forming the biggest human settlement on earth.

Tokyo is different than any place I’ve seen in Asia. First, it’s clean and organized, not something I can necessarily say about any other place I’ve seen on this continent. Cars wait at traffic lights. Horn honking is kept to a minimum. People line up in an orderly fashion no matter where you are. People are ruthlessly on time, but also painfully patient. You can watch people wait 60 seconds at a crosswalk, with no passing traffic, and nobody seems to even think about crossing before the green walking light gives them the go-ahead. Painful! And so different than elsewhere on this continent, where red lights and crosswalks are completely optional.

Tokyo is still expensive, especially by Asian standards but even by my own western standards.A decent meal will cost around 10-15$, fair enough. A taxi will cost you 10$ before you’ve even moved, and will start skyrocketing once you get past 2km. A trip just to the airport via public train cost me almost 40$, far more than my train ticket across the entire country of South Korea, or over 700km in Thailand.

With that said, Tokyo is like a Paris or Manhattan. There’s too much to wrap your head around in just one visit. It has a endless, vibrant cityscape. Great parks and public spaces. A massively confusing public transit system. But it’s really all of the niche districts, that out Tokyo on the level of places like Paris. You’ve got sub-centres like Akihabara, which is a comic/anime/video game haven unlike anywhere else in the world. Businessmen lining up in droves to play StreetFighter after work. Tokyo may be missing an Arc de Triomphe, or any one world renowned monument, but it’s these kinds of interesting things spread about this huge city that make Tokyo what it is.