Why I Love Tokyo

Guest Starring the World's Biggest Rodent

Of the four global cities, NYC, Paris, London and Tokyo, the first and the last battle for first place in my affection, New York partly because I spend lots of time there which makes it hard(er) to hate. Paris is okay but every visit is exactly like the last and let’s just say I’m no Anglophile.

So why is Tokyo so great? First of all, it’s big. You may think your city is big, but Tokyo is crap-loads bigger. Its greater metro area has almost forty million people, which is twice as big as New York’s. All this adds up to endless permutations. Want a cafe where you can feed carrots to my favorite animal, the world’s largest rodent, the capybara? There’s at least two of them. Some would say three. In one of them, you can also play with cats.

Want to unite my two favorite things watches with afternoon drinking? Right this way, Mr. Gary

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A cafe where cheerleaders cheer up suicidal salarymen? No problem. And all of this is foregrounded by the best grilled chicken in the world, places like Bird Land which not only gives you amazing butt and skin-and-neck skewers, but insane tofu and grilled yuzu.

A city as large as a pretty large country allows you to blend in and disappear, to become peripheral in another’s vision. The middle-aged man dressed as a female rabbit is perfectly safe in his individualism as he hops past you at a crosswalk.

Yes, I’m sure there are quite a few drawbacks to living here and Japan’s recent past has been interesting to say the least, but yuzu for yuzu there are few places I’d rather be.