(I Miss The) Tokyo Skyline

In downtown Tokyo, billboards hang on the skyline like the cardboard backdrop of a puppet booth. It is dusk and the pallid light of another warm afternoon mutes the colours of this neon jungle. It is calm, a far cry from London in rush hour. I search for congestion and pollution but the streets are clean. In the aftermath of World War II Tokyo had to be completely rebuilt. This meant a new infrastructure of subway, monorail and tram networks that is now one of the busiest in the world. The veins of transport that the city is built upon were meticulously designed; this is a city of 13 millions people and yet here on street level it is quiet. People flood from the subway onto the street, attached to mobile phones and tablets, connected to the city and now dispersing within it.

In Akihabara, a girl stands in costume outside a four story arcade. She checks her watch, then lowers a huge purple ray gun from her shoulder, balancing it against a wall. She folds the leaflets from her other hand into her back pocket. The girl crouches to the pavement, itching her forehead that is hidden under a thick pink bob. She reaches into a small Pikachu purse strung across her body. She taps furiously on a smartphone with her right, following the text propelling across on the screen without blinking. Her elbows stick out awkwardly with the angle at which she is sitting. Businessmen and tourists all move in one direction past her, watching their own screens and bends and twist to avoid each other, briefcases flat against thighs.

As the light begins to change this district contorts into the maze of otaku culture for which it is known worldwide; a shrine to anime and manga iconography. We climb into a lift at street level. We are greeted by a young girl dressed in black and white, grinning. Three couples sit chatting and eating, but as we enter they stop and begin clapping. We take a seat and our food arrives quickly; a burger with mincemeat ears and olives for eyes, with flushed ketchup cheeks and a creamy mozzarella nose. We drink the maid cafe version of the Asian phenomenon bubble tea; strawberry flavoured milk with engorged haribo sweets morphed into a thick gelatinous paste in the bottom of the glass.

No buildings in Akihabara have windows to reinforce a fictive dream. Arcades stretch out underground. The air con buzzes, outside the city is warm and sticky. The map is a web of primary colours circling around the beating heart of Tokyo city.