"Keeweechic's Tokyo" a Tokyo Travel Page by keeweechic

Situated between the cities of Yokohama and Chiba on a large, deep bay, Tokyo covers almost 800 square miles of the Kanto Plain in Eastern Honshu, the largest of the islands that make up Japan. Tokyo is also the capital of Japan and has more than one-tenth of the country's entire population. Over half of the major corporations of Japan have headquarters here and the city's more than two hundred colleges and universities apparently educate over half of all the students in the country. Though the city has been flattened on several occasions (during the 1923 earthquake an the 1945 war bombings), it always patches itself together to rebuild to bigger and greater things.

Part of Tokyo's look are the flashing neon and the incessant noise not to mention the clogged bumper to bumper traffic. Over 12 million people are squashed into minute apartments. Still, if you get away from the frenzy of the major roads and disappear into the tranquil backstreets where wooden houses are fronted by neatly clipped bonsai's and niches filled with ancient temples and shrines, you will see a very different side of ones first impression of Tokyo.

A city of 24 hr shopping and vending machines, a festival is held virtually every day of the year. Residents regularly visit their local shrine or temple and religiously observe the passing seasons. Right in the centre of the daily madness lies the Imperial Palace - home to the Emperor.

There is a legend which says that a giant catfish sleeps beneath Tokyo Bay, and its wriggling can be felt in the hundreds of small tremors that rumble the capital each year. Around every seventy years, the catfish awakes which results in the kind of major earthquake seen in 1995 in Kobe. The city is apparently well overdue for the Big One.

Tokyo was my first experience of an Asian country and I just loved it. We were fortunate to be staying with friends who took us around and we didn't have to try and get around the language barrier. Everything seemed very expensive, even down to MacDonalds in the Ginza. It was wonderful walking through the city seeing some of the women wearing traditional kimono's. At night the lighting effects were stunning.

There is a lot in this page but there are many many more things to see and do in both in Tokyo and out of Tokyo.