Beautiful City

For all I complain about Tokyo, I have to admit that it is a realtivly clean place. I am a 5 mintue walk from at least four parks that I can think of. Granted, only one of them seems to be maintained, but it's not really a problem because I can just walk along my river, lined with trees, flowers, birds, dog-walkers... everything peaceful you could ever imagine.

While some places in New York and Chicago (the two other big cities I have recently spent a day or two in) seem to have more "character" I can't really say they are "better". Tokyo has great public transportation. Tokyo has clean streets, and with recent bans on smoking in the street in some places, it is getting closer to being rid of one of my biggest polution complaints.

We have good recycle programs (if only more people would follow the recycling rules), and comparativly speaking, we see little garbage on street.

Why then is it so easy to make Tokyo look like a dirty, run-down city you might see in some futuristic "after the bomb" movie? It's the buildings. For all the other things that Tokyo does well, they have the ugliest buildings. Granted, many of them are warn down and old, which is a good thing that they are not considered as disposable as everything else is nowadays, but even when they were new I can't imagine they looked all that much better. Somehow, an old building in Manhatten actually looks better than the newer ones. So why is it so different here?

I'm certainly not suggesting that they should tear 'em down and "re-vitalize" the city with more monsterous wastes of resources such as the famous Roppongi-Hills. Granted, it looks nice now, but I can't imagine any sane person going inside and feeling good about the way that space and steel is being used... and I'm guessing that most of the ugly buildings we see here now were once considered "cool" and "beautiful" when they were first built. That gives Ropongi Hills what... ten yers before it is nothing more than an eyesore and waste of space in the middle of Tokyo?

Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a rant. :) this was supposed to be a comment that despite how ugly some of these photos (above) look, apart from ugly, poorly maintained buildings, Tokyo really isn't that bad.