I went to Tokyo recently...

I spent just under two days there. It is an interesting city, and one that, obviously I can only make the broadest of generalizations about. It is big, we went to a bar high up a tower block one evening (the Park Hyatt, where parts of ‘Lost in Translation’ were filmed) and the city seemd to go on forever. But at street level, in most of the places I went to, it felt very human. Many of the buildings are ‘low rise’, four to six levels as opposed to the large number of towers in Hong Kong. This adds to the feeling of space. Tokyo is built like this for a reason I am told. Earthquakes.

During my time there I took surprisingly few photo’s. The three above are from a temple complex near our hotel. My understanding is that this temple was for stillborn and miscarried babies. It was a place that was both still and peaceful, yet also full of life. And therein lays a sweeping generalization based on 48 hours in a city.

And before I go, anyone who goes “Asian” in an attempt to lump a significant proportion of the world together as one homogeneous group should spend two days in Tokyo followed by two days in Hong Kong to understand the profound cultural differences. It’s like saying European, and expecting that to cover France and England as one group.