Speculative Cityscape: Tokyo

It's been a week since I promised to explain why I want to go to Tokyo. (For context, see here.) So, here we are then...

Why I Want to Go to Tokyo
by Philip Purser-Hallard aged 33 1/4.

I've never visited Tokyo, of course, this being pretty much the point. I'm almost entirely ignorant (or at least I was before I started researching this piece) about the particulars of the place itself: what appeals is its status as an archetype. For Tokyo is basically the nearest thing on present-day Earth to the Ultimate Sci-Fi City™[1].

For a start, it's big. Admittedly it has relatively few skyscraper-scale buildings because of caution regarding earthquakes (for actual high-rise buildings it seems Shanghai or Taipei are better bets), but it sprawls quite impressively. It contains more people than any other urban conglomeration, with some twelve million individuals (forty times the population of, say, Iceland) living in the city itself. It's been the definitive twenty-first century megalopolis for a good fifty years now, its scale matched only by the destructive power of the nuclear-spawned monsters recruited to demolish it in those (equally nuclear-spawned) post-War Daikaiju movies.

It's not only big, it's alien. Naturally I'm using the word in its old-fashioned sense here (although at least one traditional strand of science fiction has always used its extraterrestrials as metaphors for non-Western cultures -- and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, even if it has given us some of media S.F.'s more clichéd alien societies). I'm also speaking, of course, as a white European, and therefore as someone who would have been barred from Japan altogether until 1853. From my point of view, Japan is a country on the other side of the world, which deliberately isolated itself from all outside influences for centuries, and which -- despite the last few generations' superficial Westernisation -- retains many aspects of a mindset and a culture which are completely foreign to my own. This comes across visually in every aspect of the city from the religion to the advertising, and I find it fascinating.

Most of all, though, Tokyo is almost insanely futuristic. This is partly because it actually is a hotbed of cutting-edge technology, partly because the vast majority of it has been built during a period of intense architectural experimentation; but mostly because, during a particular (and recent) era of the genre's development, science fiction so frequently looked to Japan as its exemplar when imagining Earth's future. Everything I wrote about cities as concrete expressions of culture applies, but in Tokyo's case everything is both amplified and fast-forwarded: it expresses equally our hopes and fears about the future of our global civilisation (which I always understand as "citification", from the Latin "civis"). And I want to take a closer look.

(Besides, they have the world's only Japanese Orthodox Cathedral. And pagodas, and artificial islands. And a slightly larger replica of the Eiffel Tower.)


[1] Note that this context -- that of discussing the archetypes and cliches of media science fiction -- is the only one in which you will ever see me using that particular abbreviation unless I'm writing in character.