a whole new scale

---

After a childhood of sunday night watching Clive James reporting on Japan, I was expecting Tokyo Narita airport to be a chrome and neon wonderland run by robots like Metal Mickey and the "beedie beedie beedie" one from Battlestar Gallactica. I was disappointed to find it a little old fashined and run by normal, if a little short, human beings. This was to be the first, last and only time we were anything but completely amazed by Tokyo.　It turned out to be the most incredible pace.

Lets start with the way the city looks. In the busiest parts of the city, and there are busy parts everywhere, everything is enormous and designed to make you look and stare. The older buildings are covered in the neon signs that we all expect . The newer buildings escape this as it would hide some spectacular modern design. Curved shapes, unusual lighting, walkways between buildings many many floors up are common. Urban planning seems to allow views from a distance of many spectacular buildings which is unusual and a great idea. Buildings that can only be viewed close up stilｌ amaze. But the real point is that these buildings don't seem like one-off showpieces, company headquarter type buildings because there are just so many of them. Some were offices, some shops, some universities or public buildings, some transport hubs, some you couldn't tell who was inside. The point is that they are just everywhere, all the time. There are so many buildings, spreading from one side of the city to the other, all that make the new tourist look and stare.　It　makes you feel like you‘re in a city on a whole new scale.

Thinking about it..."On a whole new scale" descibes well the shops and shopping in Tokyo too. We visited 4 or 5 completely separate areas and each had multiple department stores on the scale of London's Selfridges. Each had 8 or 10 or, the most we found, 14 large floors of everything and anything you could ever want. While imagining this, bear in mind that these stores hardly bother with any electrical, computing or white goods because these are handled by mighty multi-floor behemouths in a separate Tokyo area called Akihabara. Next, squeezed in between the departments stores and all manner of good value, healthy and tasty fast food outlets, there are the smaller designer clothes, jewellery and gormet food ｓtores.　Throw in some nice one offs - the biggest record shop I've ever seen, THE global Sony store, with all manner of space aged gadgets to play with, an Apple store with Ipod products that the UK won't see for months and you start to understand that Tokyo shopping was like nothing Tanuja or I had ever experienced. We were both completely sold on this city even before taking the most awesome subway journey ever.

To move on from　Tokyo　we needed to reach a ferry terminal out in Tokyo Bay and it wasn;t long before we discovered that we had to buy a super expensive extra ticket to make the final leg of the journey. Still grumbling, sweating and heaving all our kit behind us, we got onto our new subway car and noticed some subtle differences. It was extra modern, there was no driver and most importantly the new track was 20 metres above street level. The train departed (or more accurately launched) and we immediately forgave Mr Tokyo Subway for the inflated ticket price. We "flew" above the chaos of neon filled Tokyo rush hour, in and out of buildings, through flyovers and then on, out into Tokyo bay. The Tokyo Bay development is huge (of course) and is a more recent development of theme parks, large hotels and exhibition centres. Behind us we had the ever expanding view of downtown Tokyo while we rushed towards lit-up big wheels, futuristic exhibition halls and large expanses of the Tokyo Bay water. This journey is not in our Lonely Planet guide but I recommend it to everyone.

---