Tokyo is like a dystopian novel given urban form; a warning of what could happen if humanity screws up badly. If Japanese gardens are about controlling nature, the Japanese capital is about banishing it from existence. It begins 45 minutes from your arrival at Tokyo station. The last of the greenery slips away and the landscape becomes one unending stretch of cement. Mile after mile of undistinguished tower blocks, jammed roads, jarring advertising hoardings and grim overpasses. There are parks on the Tokyo city maps, but little evidence of them as you move through town. I kept remembering how
Blade Runner's sets had been based on Tokyo. I always figured it was just some ugly bit of town. Nope. It's the norm.
The day had started well.
Getting to Tokyo is a delight. The sleek and elegant
shinkansen train slips into the pristine white platform at Kyoto as boarding music plays and a conductor in tidy uniform with hat and white gloves directs the scene. People get on and off in 90 seconds. Then you glide away on tracks so smooth it's hard to believe you're on a train. Especially if your frame of reference is the UK. Only the rapid flash of bridges and light standards outside indicates the crazy speeds you're actually travelling at. The free WiFi is also fast and efficient. Every so often a hostess with a trolley of drinks and snacks comes through. She bows to the carriage before she exits. The windows are enormous and spotlessly clean, a delight since much of the journey runs through the foothills of wooded mountains; you even get 10 whole minutes of Mount Fuji looming on the left. Japanese visitors to the UK must think we are barbarians when they use our public transport, I thought.
And then Tokyo's urban sprawl began, and I realised how lovely, green and spacious London is in comparison. I'll can cope with rotten infrastructure if I get trees in exchange.
To be fair, much of this isn't Tokyo's fault. Japan is prone to natural disasters, and its traditional architecture to fires. By the middle of the 20th century there wasn't much of historical beauty left, and what remained was obliterated by American fire-bombing in World War II. Modern architects have focused on resilience and efficiency. Our hotel, the Tokyo Hilton, and its surrounding area of Shinjuku may have all the character of a corporate office park (with some trees!), but it was a great place to weather a super typhoon. With an earthquake in the middle of it. In the more beautiful countryside, villages flooded, hillsides collapsed and at least 89 people died. In Tokyo, people retreated to their concrete, glass and steel fortresses and watched the rain.
Such efficiency is probably the secret for coping with life here. Everyone follows a shared set of rules to make the crowds and ugliness tolerable. Everything is spotless. No litter. No graffiti. Eating or drinking while walking is not done; you might spill something. Subway trains are silent, even lacking the what I'd thought was the universal scourge of over-loud music buzzing out from people's headphones. Lanes are painted on train platforms to create logical traffic flows, and everyone follows them. People even look better. Workers tend to wear snappy uniforms and, if serving the public, white gloves. People in general dress more formally; trainers, tee shirts, shorts and sweats are reserved for the gym and tolerated from tourists. All of this makes Tokyo a bit easier on the eye. And I saw just two homeless people around the city in 11 days, which is fewer than I typically pass making it out of Waterloo Station on a morning commute.
All those things combined to make the city palatable, but in 11 days I never warmed to it. In part, it's because it's just so damned big. New York may sprawl over 5 boroughs, but most of what a first time tourist will want to see is in lower Manhattan. Big as London is, you can cover most of the important sites on foot. Other European capitals are even smaller. In Tokyo, most things seemed to be at least a half an hour away on public transport, with that space again between different sites. Even with marvellously efficient trains, it makes tourism hard work ... especially late at night when you just want to get back to your hotel.
There also seemed to be very little differentiation between neighbourhoods. Shibuya, Golden Gai and
Ueno all looked similar enough to discourage desire for further exploration. Did I really want to spend my evening travelling more than half an hour to discover jet another jumble of boxy, tall buildings, stacked panels of glaring neon signs and characterless underground shopping malls? After our excursion to the underwhelming Shibuya Crossing, the answer became "no".
Tokyo isn't completely without beauty. Stretches of Ginza, Roppongi Hills and the streets around our hotel were lovely. But it feels they could be anywhere in the world. It's ironic that the most salubrious bits of Tokyo seem to be the most lacking in any sort of local flavour. The people who gave us Todai-ji or Nijo Castle now seem to excel at shopping malls that would fit perfectly in Orange County, California.
I haven't totally written off Tokyo. Though 11 nights felt far too long, I'll admit that's not much time to discover a city that big. There are four entries to come on destinations in and around the capital that were special enough to deserve their own spotlight, and that I wouldn't have missed. (Tokyo's exceptional museums, DisneySea, Tsukiji market and Nikko) Here's a round-up of other experiences that brightened the dystopian gloom.
GINZA CORRIDOR, TAKUMI AND ITOYA
Most tourists will find their way to the posh shopping area of Ginza during a visit. It is undoubtably one of the most attractive bits of town. Though it could still use more parks and trees, this is an area where architects seem to have made a real effort in the past decade. There are a lot of noteworthy modern buildings to appreciate. That includes luxury shopping malls built around exquisite atriums. The problem? Most of Ginza is just a procession of the same names you see in every premium shopping district in the world.
One exception is Ginza Corridor, a street running under the elevated rail tracks between Shimbashi and Yurakucho. Small restaurants burrow beneath the arches, offering a range of cuisines and places to drink. Trees line the street and many of the establishments have decorations out front. It's a place full of character that I understand is heaving with both locals and visitors in the evening. It was quiet and welcoming at 2pm, when we wandered into Pizzeria Matteo Ginza for a break from our Japanese diet. Authentic pizzas came out of a proper brick oven, Italian pop played, they served Italian beer and wine ... and the set menu came with miso soup and green tea ice cream. Ethnic restaurant authenticity goes only so far in Japan.
When it comes to Ginza's shops, Takumi and Itoya are the notable exceptions, established at opposite
ends of the district. The first is a small gallery-style shop space over two floors that specialises in hand-made Japanese crafts. If you want to come home with a custom-dyed silk obi (waist sash) for a kimono, a hand-turned wooden sake cup or a one-of a kind ceramic version of a temple guardian tile end, this is the place for you. Their range of fabrics and ceramics was particularly good. Takumi is also surprisingly reasonable, with a range of gifts possible at the £10 mark.
Itoya is a much bigger place, and a well-known brand in Japan. If you're partial to a stationery store, this is heaven. Nine floors of exquisitely designed goodies, from pens and notebooks to calendars, desk accessories and any bit of fine design you'd ever want to put in your office. It's interesting that the digitally savvy Japanese still seem to be wedded to paper datebooks, as there was a whole floor for Filofaxes and related paper day planners. Other floors offer exquisite greeting cards of multiple layers of cut paper. Racks of beautifully printed tissues and exotic wrapping papers. Patterned sticky tape. A craft section to make a scrapbooker weep. And a paper concierge you can consult on those tricky printing jobs, at the back of an entire floor lined floor to ceiling with different papers for your printer arranged by colour, as if you've suddenly been miniaturised and dropped next the the paint swatch cards at your local DIY store. Only the size of my luggage and the fact that my shopping was limited by the time I was meeting my husband prevented me from spending stupid amounts of money.
The wonders don't stop with stationery. Itoya's top (12th) floor is a full-service restaurant that will feed you, mix you a cocktail from their custom-crafted list, or let your husband sit quietly and nurse a beer while you shop. On the floor below you can peer through glass walls at a hydroponic farm where they grow all their own salad greens. Presumably Cafe Stylo gets busier at peak meal times, but at 5:30 on a weekday it was an intimate, cosy place where a handful of visitors sat at tables and appreciated the sunset and night creeping over the city. After dark, from on high, is when I thought Tokyo was at its best.
TOKYO METROPOLITAN BUILDING
One of the best places to get a panoramic view of Tokyo must be this government building in Shinjuku. Its twin towers rate as one of the city's better pieces of modern architecture, there's an observation deck in each and admission is free. Both have cafes and gift shops, and alternate which side is open. If you can't make it out to Mount Fuji, you can see it from here on a clear day. We timed our visit to arrive just before sunset (plan to wait in a queue for 20-30 minutes) so we could get the transition from day to night. There are a handful of tables and chairs and beer available from the cafe, so you can use this as a happy hour venue as the lights of Tokyo come up.
SENSO-JI AND KAPPABASHI STREET
Senso-Ji is Tokyo's oldest temple by date of establishment. The complex features two ceremonial gates, an impressive main temple, a pagoda and a variety of subsidiary buildings. They look venerable, though they're mostly reproductions from the 1960s. There was no scrimping on artistic detail, however. Senso-Ji has the same flamboyant roof tiles, scary guardian figures, serene Buddahs, dramatic ceiling paintings and vast pots of incense I became so familiar with in Kyoto. Just add a lot more people, apartment blocks and offices looming over the complex margins and giant lanterns hanging in the gateways and the entrance to the main prayer hall.
Senso-Ji's most famous feature is the processional avenue between the two gates, packed with small shops. It's fun, but this is mostly cheesy tourist stuff, a lot no doubt made in China, and the crowds don't encourage browsing. Elbow your way to the main temple building, gawp at the architecture and the gorgeous ceiling, then leave down the steps to the left as you face the altar. Here, in the shadow of the pagoda, there's a small garden, a variety of small shrines and funerary memorials. You're only 100 metres from the main avenue and temple, but few tourists wander in this direction. If you're hungry, a line of pop-up vendors sells a variety of food and drink along the complex's side entrance. If you go out this way, you'll end up in a shopping arcade that's far more interesting than the famous avenue, full of shops selling traditional Japanese clothing and accessories that it looks like Japanese people might actually wear.
From here it's a 20-minute stroll to Kappabashi Street, Tokyo's famous kitchenware district. This area is called Asakusa and was the first, and only, place I went that felt like a proper neighbourhood with a distinctive, quirky feel. Many of the buildings are still low-rise two to six stories, with a few wooden structures and a handful of architectural features that actually look pre-war. It isn't necessarily beautiful, but is does have character. There are a lot of craft workshops and boutiques on the smaller side streets, selling things like ceramics, hand-printed paper products, leather goods, fabrics and glass beads. Kappabashi Street itself, however, is a long stretch of retail targeting the restaurant industry. There are stores for every kind of pot and pan, chopsticks, bento boxes, ceramics, knives ... even chef and waitress uniforms. Though it's set up for professionals, regular people are welcome here and it seemed to be a major destination for locals on a Sunday afternoon.
ROPPONGI HILLS
The luxurious shopping centre attached to the Ritz Carlton is a rare example of the Japanese combining their flare for designing modern retail spaces with local flavour. The elegant, restrained architecture has an organic feel that echoes traditional Japanese buildings. There's wood evoking sliding panels, a glass roof allowing sunlight to stream in, copper wall reliefs that have the look of hand-painted silks and a bamboo grove springing from the pavement at the bottom of the atrium. Even better, at least 30% of the brands here actually seemed to be Japanese. In addition to another outlet of the marvellous Itoya (this one branching out from stationery into quirky gift items and tremendously comfortable, made-in-Japan slippers), there's an intriguing little place stuffed with a range of chopsticks and chopstick rests, a ridiculously upscale store of Japanese knives and an impressive ceramics place. There's also a range of clothing brands I've never heard of selling high fashion, but as it's targeted at Japanese women only the very small should consider crossing the thresholds.
Other than Itoya, a look at the prices will quickly indicate that, as delightful as window shopping may be, buying here is reserved for the super-rich. The best example of that is a store on the bottom level called Sun Fruits. This temple of white marble displayed fruit like couture jewellery, celebrated the large and the precision-shaped. There were bunches of grapes the size of walnuts, so perfect in colour and form they looked carved from marble. Apples the size of normal cantaloupes. Pears like softballs. And, most remarkably, perfectly square watermelon which could be yours for just £117.
The top floor of the complex holds the Suntory Art Museum, a small gallery with rotating exhibits and an excellent museum shop. It stocks quality stuff of Japanese inspiration, like fans, silk scarves and miniature reproductions of old screens, for prices in line with other museum shops.
Though Roppongi looks the same as most of the rest of Tokyo when standing outside at street level, guidebooks talk about at least one other mixed leisure complex, small gardens, additional galleries and one of Tokyo's best observation decks. The whole area, dubbed Tokyo Midtown, was only developed in 2003 and I sense this may be Tokyo's attempt to clear away some of the uglier post-war modernism in favour of architecture and design they can be proud of.
It would be a place worthy of further exploration and maybe even a home base for a future trip to Tokyo. There's an affordable Ibis as well as that Ritz Carlton. While I never warmed to Tokyo, You really can't say you've visited Japan without stopping here.
We spent 11 nights at the Tokyo Hilton as part of our package with England Rugby Travel. We enjoyed the generously-sized room, a spectacular view and complete safety during Typhoon Hagibis. It also doesn't seem to have been built to cope with a full house, requiring queuing for the lifts and breakfast buffet and with an indoor pool curiously undersized for such a big place. The surrounding streets of Shinjuku are tree-lined and quiet outside of rush hour; the area seems to be a giant office park. It's convenient and well-connected to transport lines, though lacking any local character or charm.
I've saved the best for last. If, out of all the glorious things I saw in three weeks in Japan, I could only pick one, it would be the 
There are lively carvings of animals, both real and mythological, above the windows and doors; a preview of what's to come. Across the square, next to the ticket booth, steps ascend steeply to the first of the complex's ceremonial gates. This one, amusingly, has elephants trumpeting from its corners. But not as we know them. It's rather obvious that the sculptors had never seen one of the beasts, so these seem more mythical than the dragons flying all over the buildings.
