Tokyo New City Guide. Mayumi Yoshida Barakan

the homesick. One street near the station is a more traditional Japanese-style shopping area, and Arisugawa Park is a short walk away.

      Shibuya

      One of the first things anyone should know about Shibuya is the heart-warming story of Hachi, a dog of the native Japanese Akita breed. Hachi would escort his master, a professor at Tokyo University, to Shibuya Station each morning and return in the evening to meet him on his way home from work. One day the professor suffered a stroke and never came home, but the faithful Hachi returned to the station each evening to wait. This went on for seven years. When Hachi finally died in 1935, he was on the front page of all the major newspapers. Gifts and letters poured in from around the country, and a bronze statue of Hachi was erected in the plaza in front of the station. Hachiko Square (North Exit) is probably the most famous meeting place in the city. The real Hachi was stuffed and is part of the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art.

      As a district, Shibuya fits somewhere between the wildness of Shinjuku, the kids of Harajuku, and the sophistication of Roppongi. There is an abundance of department stores, boutiques, record shops, and theaters. In the evening the area draws crowds of students and young office workers to its inexpensive discotheques and nomiya (Japanese-style bars). Since the 1980s, its development has been spurred by the "store wars" between competing department store chains: Seibu and its Parco, Seed, Prime, and Loft Buildings; Tokyu with its Tokyu Plaza, Tokyu Hands, 109, and Bunkamura; Marui with its several fashion buildings.

      Until recently, Shibuya was a quiet residential area. Named after the Shibuya family whose castle was located here, during the Edo period the district was just one step up from the provinces. After the Meiji Restoration, the samurai residents vacated and the lands were used for tea fields and grazing. When the earthquake destroyed much of Tokyo in 1923, people moved from the center of town and undeveloped, almost rural districts like Shibuya, Meguro, and Setagaya became heavily residential. After the war, Shibuya housed one of the city's largest black markets.

      Daikanyama—Ebisu

      A short distance from Shibuya, Daikanyama has been a model for the development of Tokyo's peripheral residential districts. Since the seventies when the Maki Fumihiko-designed Hillside Terrace complex was first opened, the area has grown slowly and gracefully with shops, restaurants, and the occasional gallery. Like many of the recently developed, or soon to be developed, neighborhoods, public transportation is limited making them favorite destinations for weekend drivers. The streets are lined with foreign imported cars and their fashionably dressed passengers.

      Benefiting from this popularity, Ebisu has followed suit and is now positioned to become one of the next hip areas. Already restaurants, clubs, and shops are filling the back streets and the major Sapporo Beer development is guaranteed to change the face of the neighborhood.

      Harajuku

      Dedicated to youth, fashion trendiness, and the belief that all consumers under twenty-five are created equal, Harajuku thrives as the kid's capital of Tokyo. The district swarms with the well-dressed pampered youth of Japan, raised in an era of post-war prosperity and carefree consumerism. But the rigorous school system, the pressures for conformity applied to the salary-man, and the satisfied-housewife pattern of life have their young victims. Many of the dancers who have filled Harajuku's Yoyogi Park every Sunday for the past decade or so are the ones who can't make it in the system or simply don't care to try. In an ironic display of rebellious behavior, the kids dance in well-choreographed, polite groups—usually boys with boys, girls with girls. The original dancers in the later 70s were named the Takenokozoku, or "bamboo-shoot-people," after the bright Asian-style costumes made by a boutique called Takenoko. In the eighties James Dean was the role model and fifties nostalgia reigned. Since the nineties, the dancers have been joined by growing crowds of foreign, often Middle Eastern, laborers who gather nearby.

      The spirit of Harajuku is as infectious as it is insipid. For young fashion, the district beats any other part of Tokyo. Most of the big designers' boutiques are in nearby Aoyama and Shibuya, but cheap knock-offs and play clothes overflow from the hundreds of shops near the central crossing and lining the back streets. The main landmark is the La Foret fashion building, and down the street toward Togo Jinja shrine is Takeshitadori, famous for its bargains in trendy fashions.

      North of the district is Yoyogi Park, the Meiji Jingu shrine, and its outer gardens. The park attracts some of Tokyo's more individualistic inhabitants—dancers and street performers of all kinds, and toward the north end of the park a few saxophonists or trumpeters will invariably be practicing their instruments in the bushes.

      Aoyama

      The post-Harajuku generation finds more of interest in the neighboring Aoyama district, where life moves at a more sophisticated, expensive pace. The main street, Aoyama-dori, stretches from Shibuya to Akasaka, meeting along the way a number of side streets that spawn ever growing numbers of boutiques, specialty shops, and restaurants. Kotto-dori, on the Shibuya end, is famous for its antique shops. The road to the Nezu Museum nearby has boutiques by Tokyo's top fashion designers and many top European designers as well. It also boasts Tokyo's first major building by Osaka-based architect Ando Tadao—La Collectione.

      Aoyama has more good design and architecture than any other district. The Spiral and Tepia buildings by Maki Fumihiko, Collectione by Ando Tadao, the Mori Hanae Building, and Sogetsu Hall by Tange Kenzo, and dozens of other smaller buildings by young and emerging Japanese architects as well as work by well-known western architects such as Mario Botta and Aldo Rossi.

      The Edo period Aoyama daimyo family lived here, leaving for posterity their name and the family graveyard, now the Aoyama-bochi, a great place for a quiet stroll or for viewing the spring cherry blossoms.

      On the Akasaka end of Aoyama-dori is a huge walled-in green spot that hides the Akasaka detached palace, the latter being an official state guest house modeled after Buckingham Palace on the outside and Versailles on the inside.

      Shinjuku

      A showcase for all the worst aspects of the city's chaos, Shinjuku has, at the same time, a stronger, more vibrant spirit than any other part of town. Much of the spirit borders on sleaze. Shinjuku is the latest of the late night districts, and one of the cheapest. It's here that night-time revelers come to escape the sophistication and civility of the city's chic southwest districts.

      Shinjuku has always had a rather questionable reputation. During the Edo period it was a small lodging town, not even within the city limits. A fight between a local brothel owner and the younger brother of an influential samurai official led to the area's disappearance. But fifty years later it grew up again and became a major pleasure quarter frequented by the lower classes.

      In 1889 Shinjuku Station was built with a new train line servicing the western suburbs. The area immediately prospered. The residential population increased, as did the number of pleasure houses. When courtesans were liberated in 1872, the formalities of the geisha entertainments were abandoned, and most of the former geisha houses became simple houses of prostitution with rooms for rent. Shinjuku was notorious for having more such rooms than any other part of town. Plans to clean up the neighborhood and relocate the pleasure quarter were drawn up but never put into effect.

      The area continued to grow and in 1920 part of it was annexed into the city's Yotsuya Ward. The rest of the district became a part of Tokyo in 1932 when the city limits were redrawn. The station became increasingly important as a commuter transfer point and is now the largest in the country, handling over two million passengers a day.

      Shinjuku has prospered. Around the station are found some of the highest rents in Japan. Department stores, boutiques, fashion buildings, and the huge Shinjuku Station underground arcade serves commuters on their way home or suburbanites in for the weekends when the major thoroughfare becomes a pedestrian "paradise" (or "hell" depending on how much you like mobs). Students from the surrounding universities form another big part of the crowd.

      But life in Shinjuku really begins after dark. Kabukicho is the center of the action. The Kabuki theater originally planned as a cultural focus for the neighborhood never materialized, but gave the district its name. In its place a modern pleasure quarter flourished after the war. The area has numerous movie theaters, and