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A few nights ago, on a lark, Sam Holden — public bath and Onomichi specialist, urbanist and translator — and I, amidst a post-dinner stroll through Tokyo, decided to “walk through Shibuya.” I try with all my might to avoid Shibuya as one might avoid french-kissing a running blender (or scraping a kidney stone along one’s ureter). At best, I’ll skirt the edges, but I’m always happy to take a more circuitous train or walking route simply to avoid the station and its immediate envrions. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some great spots in Shibuya — little record shops and old bars and a few old kissa, the much beloved Lion, of course — but the whole of the thing, the “heart” of the place, has been compromised by redevelopment (with more to come) to such a degree that it makes it feel like all the hangers-on have some terminal disease. So to save this delicate heart of mine, I don’t go. But maybe it was worth a looksie?

En route, Sam and I strolled through the silent and pitch-black Aoyama Cemetery, one of my favorite places to walk at night. Tokyo today was, in a way, saved centuries ago by cemeteries and temples and shrines — little bastions of green that would otherwise have been concreted over. If you’re looking for green, I always tell people, head to a shrine or where ashes lie. Aoyama Cemetery is especially potent. A kind of outside-of-time black hole, it gives clear perspective on how Tokyo is changing. From the darkness between the graves, you get a panoramic vista of all the Minato-ku so-called “tower mansions” and mega-developments that have peppered the sky in the last decade. Twenty years ago, standing in the same spot, you’d have seen almost no buildings, or at best, the very tippy-tops of a few perimital apartments. Now, it’s a veritable skyline of wealth, glistening, kowtowing to foreign capital, families perched some thirty or forty stories above it all, taking elevators to their underground parking, driving G-Wagons to other gleaming buildings, never really interacting with or feeling or, quite frankly, contributing to the fabric of the city on the microscale, the everyday scale. Lives aloof, aloft, you could say. Two decades back, this kind of interfacing with Tokyo was rarer, or at least better hidden.

Beyond the cemetery, Sam and I walked into the brightness of Gaienmae. A line of folks sat on benches outside of Starbucks with laptops. We lamented the loss of a forth-floor bar called Office (though the building is still there!) — a great spot that looked down on the intersection. Nearby, the percussive bang of fireworks capped a baseball game at Jingumae Stadium, the outfield-seating in which Haruki Murakami claims to have lounged (back when the cheap seats were a grass hill), summer beer in hand, when he had the sudden thought: Hey, I think I could write a novel. We walked past what was once a building called Bell Commons, raized in 2014 and turned into another piece of glass with a boutique hotel. Then down through Omotesando.

The small backstreets bounded by Omotesando Crossing on one corner, and the Trunk Hotel (which, respect: is a building with a lot of greenery happening) on the other, is one of my favorite neighborhood nooks (Jingumae 5-chome) in the whole of central Tokyo. Somehow — SOMEHOW — it has retained a wacky, largely unscrubbed air of creativity and architectural interestingness despite the desires of spreadsheet-developers like Mori who would love to turn the thing into another Omotesando Hills.¹ Much to the chagrin of Mori, 5-chome has resisted. Many of the buildings are “old” (that is: from the Showa era; fifty or sixty years old), and the new ones are sufficiently weird that they mostly blend (although you do feel the creeping in of Prefab Nothingness here and there). Even so, for the most part, you can find small, cheap apartments next to Paul Smith, next to independent designers, next to old-school indie publishers like Voyager, next to beautiful old homes — it’s truly a square-kilometer marvel of a neighborhood, and points to the best of how central Tokyo could and should be, though is becoming less and less common.

By the time we got to Trunk, the flood of New Shibuya became plainly visible. Turn the corner and you’re hit with the redeveloped Miyashita Park, ten years ago a gritty skate park and homeless encampment, now Baleciaga + Gucci + Louis Vuitton + Prada + Panda Express, the “park” raised to the roof of the building (to keep the homeless away? though I did spot a few sat on the sidewalk as pedestrians blithely strode past), though even if the homeless did wander up to the top, they’d probably jump off the roof in despair as the “park” is no park, and to call it a park is to disrespect all other parks the world round.²

Make no mistake, the redevelopment of Shibuya — how they’ve built so much so quickly, and without disrupting the trains (essentially “rebuilding an airplane mid-flight”) — is a miraculous feat of engineering. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like anyone concerned with culture, local energy, local shops, or the citizens of Shibuya were consulted on what was built or how it was build. Miyashita Park dovetails into an ersatz post-war-Shinbashi-under-the-tracks, bleached-to-the-bone yokocho eating and drinking strip, half empty, half packed with tourists in an eternal selfie pose. Hilariously, the escalator down from the gleaming new “park” ejects folks into the old “pissing alley” drinking area, one of the few “authentic” (that is, having emerged organically some time in the past, not overtly planned, made (theoretically) for the people of the place) pieces of Shibuya (cockroach filled may it be; the first bar on the corner had hopping, yelping customers and a bartender wielding a can of Raid) remaining on that side of the station today. Reduced to a hundred or so meters of ramshackle bars, counters just big enough for five people, one wonders how one could possibly be a regular with such social-media-fueled modernity and manic commercialization all around.

By this point of the walk, the ratio of tourists:locals was tipping wildly in favor of the former. The old Shibuya Station, much to my surprise, had been completely demolished (like I said, I hadn’t been here in ages), removing any last trace of what used to be. It was a Wednesday night, and the intersection thronged with a trillion people, or at any rate, more people than you’d see on a Friday night twenty years ago. When the lights changed it became a mad rush to get your shot amidst melee of The Crossing, to pose it up, to hope to be blessed later by the algorithm.

From there we walked into Center Gai. Or, rather, were swept into it, the “main” street of Shibuya, you could say. A long, long time ago, it was said Blade Runner was modeled on Tokyo. (I always felt Hong Kong was the true spiritual model.) But the core of the aesthetic that made Black Runner so alluring was grittiness. Old neon has a quality like film — a grain — that can’t be reproduced with LED lighting. It had been years (maybe ten?) since I walked Center Gai at night, and the blast of light, the kind of GenAI scene before us (“LLM: Please make Future Tokyo”) was so overwhelming all I could do was laugh. LED signage galore, crowds so thick you couldn’t see the street. White kids smoked casually left and right, outside every conbini groups drank chuhais and beers (though now drinking alcohol on the streets in Shibuya is “banned” precisely because of all of this; the death of The Good Thing by dint of scale), harried European parents fed meat buns to their kids in strollers like they were puppies, more people smoked,³ a sprawling Indian family lined up to order ramen from a chain ramen shop with giant English-language kiosks out front, twenty Black folks posed for a group portrait in front of a conveyor belt sushi joint, a Japanese rap group was shooting a video gonzo-style as a dozen tourists filmed, grown men livestreamed speaking Spanish as they jostled past, a woman speaking Portuguese frantically grasped at objects in a shop filled with souvenirs. And mixed within, I suppose, too, there were travelers and locals like us simply there to be eyewitnesses to the circus.

What was different, say, in 2001? Well, there was (ostensibly) local culture. You had the gyaru and gyaruo and the yamamba and other Shibuya oddities straight out of Egg. You could, uh, see the street. Center Gai was never a strictly “local” spot (I mean, this is Shibuya after all), it always had an aura of transience, but there was never not a human-ish-scale to it: kids trickling in from the suburbs looking to find meaning in “the big city.” That sort of stuff. Sure, some tourists, a rouge Gas Panic, but nothing like today, and without the same impulse to consume the very place itself. Because that was the overriding feeling — that everyone around us was there to eat the city, to ingest the city, to take home as much as they could. The purity of intent was breathtaking. Shibuya was there for their pleasure, for them to merge with, mostly digitally. I’m not even sure you can call it selfish when it happens at a mass scale, an existential natural disaster.

In this sense, it was fascinating. Horrifying but also kind of … cool? Hordes, yes, but international in a way Tokyo should aspire to, and with a laudible placidity and straightforwardness to their desires. Nobody was lying. Everyone was authentic in their hunger. Tourists rapacious for overpriced knickknacks and waiting in line for substandard food. Tourists chowing down on white-bread egg sandos, guided by: a billion hours of staring at hand computers, flick-flicking through TikToks and Reels, the Algorithm rewarding the most garish over the most thoughtful, rewarding extremes over silence, travel-fluencers, a full realization of what happens when you scale late-stage capitalism through the lens of omnipresent technology with no guardrails. You get Center Gai in 2025. And Sam and I stood in the middle of it, stunned.

That so much chaos and odd desire (as I’ve written many times before: I cannot wrap my head around the heart of an average tourist) could be swaddled in so much peace, was not lost on us. It was strangely peaceful, in the sense that nobody was aggressive, there were no touts, no one was fighting, no one begged. It was precisely as if Times Square of the 2000s had birthed a city block with Walt Disney. There were no hard edges to the scene, nothing to worry about. And in this sense, a kind of perfect net. Knowing nothing more than social media, desiring so desperately to “be” in Tokyo, to “prove” you were in Tokyo, to “capture” your being there (for what other reason is there to travel in the eye of likes and views?), this scene, this energetic vibe of “being in it” of “having arrived” would, I can totally understand, fulfill almost all of those desires, of feeling like YES, HERE I AM and TOKYO IS BANANAS, LOOK!

Because what Tokyo actually is — what Tokyo is in its truest, most distilled essence — is silence. Tokyo is silent back lanes and dark winding alleys. Tokyo is low-rise homes and affordable housing that stretches from the soundless, wide rivers abutting Chiba to the quiet mountains of Yamanashi, becoming farmland much more quickly than you’d imagine. Tokyo is a vibrant shotengai sans mania, filled with local shops owned by multi-generational families — lit by warm bare bulbs at night — who know the faces of all their customers, just outside a station ten minutes west of Shibuya. Tokyo is Gakugei Daigaku and Koenji where community and subculture thrives. Tokyo is walking Aoyama Cemetery in total silence, just down the road from just whatever it might be that Center Gai represents. Tokyo is sento culture, where folks commune in hushed nakedness. Tokyo is vibrant central neighborhoods like Kagurazaka that mix the old and the new powerfully, that have fascinating histories, beautiful topographies, secrets and architectural delights and a feeling of true life being lived. And a very, very tiny part of central Tokyo is now, I guess: The Circus.

Tokyo does have inspired redevelopments. Kioi Seido, “the building with no purpose,” is a beautiful example of how glass and concrete can sing when used well.⁴ In the last twenty years, the whole Kiyosumi area, with its Museum of Contemporary Art went from an extremely sleepy eastern suburb, to a neighborhood with an admirable mix of salt-of-the-earth and cool. In terms of large-scale, hyper-commercial developments, the whole western side of Tokyo Station (Marunouchi as it’s called) is pretty damn good — a huge focus on pedestrian comfort, use of existing beautiful buildings (Kitte), “real” materials (stone, brick), and spaciousness interlocking with the Imperial Palace’s outer gardens.

Sam and my walk down Center Gai lasted only ten minutes (if that!). By the time you get to Outback Steakhouse, the crowds peter out, and then a few more minutes of walking gets you to the back of Tomigaya, where the silence, in contrast to the blare minutes earlier, is both deafening and nourishing: A total wormhole inversion. Small shops, places where you imagine you could form a lifelong relationship with an owner, dot the road.

That violent contrast — so quickly going from famished consumption to pin-drop quiet — is also Tokyo, but to have it at this scale is new. Kabukicho was always a bit of the circus, but Kabukicho had grit and was never “safe” in the same way. (Though it, too, has undergone radical tourist-focused changes in the last decade; RIP Golden Gai; 2 a.m. batting cages 4eva.) Center Gai was never that gritty, but today it’s even more risk-free, pure anodyne delight, a sheet of glass reflecting back a million transient people “being in Tokyo.”

Something happened in this last decade the world over — in consumerism and politics and city planning, in education (smartphones in the classroom) and the way we consume news (smartphones everywhere), in how addicted we are to dopamine (smartphones always in hand) and how incapable so many of us are of standing in quiet thought for even a ten-second escalator ride, in how there is an irrepressible and ravenous hunger to reduce complexity (“Vaccines, BAD!”) to the ten-second sound bite — that has infused the masses with a kind of thinking that, to those of us who aren’t eternally online, who haven’t binged Fox News for twenty years or who don’t clock six hours a day of TikTok, feels utterly foreign and unknowable. Not even in the “you’re just getting old” sort of way (though I’m sure there’s that, too), but more cleaving, more incongruous. There’s a growing collection of us who feel eternally gaslit, like the whole of the world has shifted into a configuration that can’t possibly be true, and yet here it is. These are our leaders? These are our policies? This is how we develop a city?

And just to be clear: The reason I feel such a tinge of discomfort by the Center Gai scene is not because I care what travelers do, but because I can’t unsee: the forces driving mass hyper-consumptive tourism are the same ones fomenting fascism, science skepticism, kleptocracy, billionaire veneration, labubus, and entertaining ourselves with little colored bubbles until the very second before we die.

Like many of you reading this, I’m not sure how to respond. Running off to live in a cave (the head-in-the-sand move) feels defeatist and entitled. Pointing at these things makes you feel like an old man screaming at a cloud. And yet, staying plugged-in feels like wearing the world’s stupidest hair-shirt. Here’s what I’ve tried to do and am trying to do more of: to remember to look, to focus my attention, to sit with something for more than a beat. And training myself to do these things by diving more deeply back into physical books, offline spaces, and on more and more walks — even (maybe especially) walks through a luminescent heart of darkness. A walk is one of the dumbest (as in: it’s embarrassing to even have to mention it), most powerful tools we have. Keep your phone in your bag (or even better: at home) and walk across the city on a humid summer night. By moving your body you move your mind. Think about the gradients of energy and people, about how the architecture changes and why, what was and what is and what may be, and sure, stroll through Center Gai (all judgy and baffled you might be) to feel that, too. It is a spectacle, after all. But don’t stress too much, because a few more minutes of walking returns you to the quintessence of Tokyo, a quiet back road, the sounds of baths being drawn, lives being lived for the city itself, for the people in it, folks getting ready for tomorrow, not to go home with a piece of the city, but to add a little more to it in whatever way they can.

More soon,
C

Noted