Article: Geography of cool: Tokyo.(Brief Article)

Secret village

EVER since Junichiro Tanizaki, a celebrated Japanese novelist, complained that "foreigners and Japanese alike denounce our capital as not a city but a collection of villages," visitors to Tokyo have remarked that this city without a centre is really a cluster of small separate towns. But what they rarely mention is that, without its small-town provincialism, the sheer size of Tokyo would make it wholly unliveable.

There are fashionable districts such as Omote Sando, Azabu Juban and Daikanyama where people flock to restaurants, bars, boutiques and galleries. And teen-agers, of course, have Shibuya, Harajuku, Roppongi to draw them from far ...

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