The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being. Sure, I can extract the basics of a television news report or a newspaper article, but that’s asking for too much concentration to pleasurably distract me.
Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture, and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance. Now, some eighty years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria—a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and Third World middlemen—the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. It is perhaps unintentional that the authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter economically, culturally, and demographically. Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades,” and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past fifteen years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesando, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.
Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address vacationers thronging formerly sedate neighborhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savor the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution,” a term born in the academy before becoming ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.
Tokyo’s race toward peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of around five thousand square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities like Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.
Still, mass tourism is as demoralizing and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank—I know it is not maliciousness on their part—but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offenses invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathizes with the family of sightseers blundering their way onto a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the sidewalk at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.
As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated.
Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been perpetually relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omotenashi—basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese—has been popularized by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists, or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlor.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.
Don’t Be My Guest
Mine is not a neighborhood for sophisticated tourists. Taito Ward is temples and cheap hotels. The more civilized sightseers are busy elsewhere, I know, for I have seen them fondling secondhand 2.55 flap bags in Daikanyama, wandering in Koenji alleys in search of the Kitakore Building, and chatting with each other in Harmonica Yokocho over matcha highballs. Chinese tourists still make up the bulk of travelers to Japan, but there are markedly fewer than five or eight years ago. Perhaps they have had their fill of Senso-ji or find the shoddy stalls in Ameyoko suspicious. In this part of East Tokyo, the tourists come mostly from Australia or America, white English speakers decked out in athletic gear like they expect the flat course from Ueno to Asakusa to tax their endurance. In inclement weather, they cover themselves and their rucksacks in disposable rain jackets, so that they look like ghosts coming through the mist.
They approach with a rustle and the rumble of plastic wheels on pavement. They sleep in converted love hotels in Uguisudani. They gather at the mammoth Uniqlo in Okachimachi. They take photographs outside of temples in Asakusa. They wear body cameras so that they can show to the world their visit to Kappabashi. I surveil them without guilt: they have come to turn their tourist gaze on the city, and turnabout is fair play.
Battalions of the immigrant proletariat have been redirected to this half of the city to serve the tourists, who likely overlook how the waitresses at Asakusa restaurants are now often Vietnamese students and Chinese sojourners. It is beyond most foreigners to listen for a note in a server’s accent when they speak English or Japanese (now that ordering is most frequently done on a tablet, conversation is kept to a minimum anyway), let alone be alert to telltale, un-Japanese body language. The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “Comprehensive Measures for Acceptance and Coexistence of Foreign Nationals,” many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a twenty-eight-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up part of the Technical Intern Training Program, a scheme to bring in unskilled labor under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud, and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement, and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programs—in 2023 alone, more than nine thousand interns disappeared from the books—they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.
This is what happens when deindustrialization and financialization run riot. As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated. The ruling center-right Liberal Democratic Party acknowledges them as their sole defense against shoshi koreika: “fewer children and aging.” Until automation takes a stronger hold—we’re only now phasing out floppy disks, fax machines, and employment-for-life—or the economies of Vietnam and Nepal surpass Japan’s, the only way to keep salad wraps in Lawsons is to import staff. Federations of bureaucrats and upstart politicians dream of an economy based on real estate investment and financial speculation. They would prefer to run their new city with a new population, one willing to render their cash or labor without expecting the power to make demands. Demographic collapse can be sidestepped, tourists and guest workers selected by grade like eggs, quotas adjusted to the whims of finance. The state-affiliated Japan National Tourism Organization is shooting for sixty million tourists a year by 2030. Efforts are underway to entice foreigners to work as farmhands, cooks, and truck drivers. Meanwhile, the Japanese population shrinks to a nub.
Kitchen Confidential
The guest workers don’t live in this neighborhood either. My neighbors are the subset known as expatriates: the software engineer from Sweden who sends his daughter to the same school as my son; the English teacher from Tennessee; the Chinese couple who run a signage shop down the block; the Gujarati jewelry dealer I know to wave at, who illegally parks a Maserati with a swastika on its hood outside the mid-rise next door; and the French photographer whose Japanese wife tells me theories about dog training, vegetarian diets, and 5G in the vaccine.
I myself followed a woman to Tokyo. We met when she was a tourist in my country. We were to return to her home and then leave to drift through rugged places as tourists together, before I signed up for a master’s in contemporary Chinese literature at Sun Yat-sen University, and she sweated through an undergraduate degree in a more marketable field. But too many months went by. We ran out of money, we were happy, and I was trapped. We married at the municipal office in Shibuya, posed for the silly portraits that are de rigueur for newlyweds (her in gown and costume jewelry, me in matte gray tailcoat), and made the formal application to convert my tourist visa to “Spouse or Child of Japanese National,” authorized to work in any sector.
I took a job mopping vomit and picking up empty cups at a nightclub in Roppongi. I bussed tables in an Italian restaurant in Harajuku and worked in the kitchen of a pizza shop in Oji, apprenticing under an embittered long-term expatriate restaurateur forced into business with his ex-wife. It felt familiar. I had worked most of my life at the lowest end of the service industry or in warehouses and slaughterhouses. I consoled myself that when I finally finished my novel, it would be more authentic for having been composed while I was forking soggy hamburger buns into the trash. With few marketable skills, I didn’t have much choice.
It didn’t help that I was too stubborn and stupid to learn Japanese. I skipped the free language lessons provided by the Arakawa Ward government and worked on my Russian instead, hoping to understand what the bouncers in Roppongi were saying. I practiced my Spanish with the Peruvians who worked front-of-house at the Italian place. I never learned a polite word in Tagalog, only obscene slang.
I learned Vietnamese in Tokyo running food at a private club in Minato because I was in love with a dishwasher and wanted to make her smile. Thúy An and I didn’t immediately share a language beyond the rudimentaries of kitchen argot. Japanese was spoken in the front of house to suit the desires of the typical member. The waitresses were generally suburban girls recently returned from study vacations in Sydney or Vancouver, capable of switching from the breezy Californian they used for the wives of foreign dignitaries and bankers on expatriate packages to the reassuring tones of nihongo service requisite for dealing with Aoyama blue bloods. The cooks were mostly Filipino and Indonesian, capable of reading a ticket in basic English and taking commands from the chef; the runners were usually from Nepal. The dishwashers and janitors, whose tasks could be completed mute, were Vietnamese and Chinese and West African.
There is not much that I knew for sure about Thúy An, and what little I did was meaningless. There is no sense in telling you about the shape of her philtrum or about how she once extended a hand to me to show that even the skin of her palms was raw and red from hours in gloves and hot water. There is no sense in recounting my disappointment when, after I trawled the shops in the basement of Mitsukoshi for an appropriate pastry to give her, she called in sick. Because I felt self-conscious singing its tones to a stranger, my Vietnamese progressed slowly, and it never got to the point that I could press her about her choices in life. I was never sure what brought her to Japan. I didn’t know whether she was eager to learn Japanese or if she was only fulfilling her student visa. She dutifully attended class each morning, diagramming sentences, copying down honorific verb endings, and listening to cassette tapes of dialogue. I can’t remember where she was from. (I do remember her taking off a glove, drying her fingertip on her collar, and scrolling to the rough coordinates of her hometown on Google Maps on my phone.) A city somewhere in Vietnam’s northwest, at least, which most people her age escaped. She dashed for the last Hibiya Line train if we had to stay late—unwilling to risk a night in an internet café, unable to budget for a taxi to Adachi or Sumida—but I can’t remember where she lived.
I have never run into her in the Vietnamese enclave strung out between Uguisudani and Nippori, where I go for coffee on the weekend. It is strange to walk in the enclaves. The American habit of going out to enjoy the food of foreigners does not exist in Tokyo, and it is rare to hear Japanese spoken among the guests at a Vietnamese restaurant, except at lunchtime, when lunches with modified versions of Chinese dishes are offered to local office workers. Some of the enclaves have fearsome reputations, like that of the Kurds in Warabi. Just as few took note of the Korean schools and churches in Mikawashima, established by guest workers imported in the 1920s and maintained by those rendered stateless after the Second World War, there is no reason that anyone would notice the string of Vietnamese shops that dot the route from Uguisudani to Nippori unless they were looking for them. That the sound trucks of the far right still park in front of Shin-Okubo Station, agitating against Koreans despite Indonesians and Chinese guest workers having supplanted them, is proof nobody pays attention to these things.
That is how the guest worker is deployed: concealed in dormitories and closed worksites on the margins of the city, moving under cover in the city, foreign agents adopting a new language and new lifestyle only to be spirited out of the country before anybody more permanent gets to know them.
After I quit my job, I never saw Thúy An again. I could project onto her publicly available data on Vietnamese guest workers and the promises made by labor brokers to employers, and she could become an average of the five hundred thousand Vietnamese workers in the country. A woman, young, not necessarily undereducated but without prospects at home, willing to work long hours ripping squid guts, spreading fertilizer, and driving forklifts—jobs for which too few Japanese workers could be found. I might substitute her essence for a composite of other acquaintances so she could become a socialist-realist hero: homesick but brave, poor and self-sacrificing, loyal to her own culture while open to the world. That is not what I want to do. She is a cipher because that is how the guest worker is deployed: concealed in dormitories and closed worksites on the margins of the city, foreign agents adopting a new language and new lifestyle only to be spirited out of the country before anybody more permanent gets to know them.
City Pop
Now I earn a living writing, with wire transfers from abroad. It is better to be in the category of tourist that can call itself expatriate, even if it pains me to admit I have more in common with the Swedish software engineer across the street than the Chinese student-laborers who spill out of a language school above the closest 7-Eleven in the afternoon. Being an expatriate author is not as glamorous as I imagined as a boy dreaming of a loft in Tangier with a novel-in-progress spread out on the floor. It is not even as romantic as when I attempted it the first time, spending through my savings in Guangzhou, writing unpublishable short stories in between appeals to my mother for another Western Union wire. But it does mean I am sought out by sophisticated tourists when W. David Marx doesn’t get back to them. This began when the country reopened after the pandemic, and the exchange rate made it affordable for half-famous authors, graduate students with bylines in leftist magazines, and minor internet celebrities to travel to Tokyo.
Flattered by their attention, I was happy to act as de facto tour guide to what passes for “authentic” Tokyo. I met my guests at Uguisudani Station, pointing in the direction of a cluster of love hotels where a recent street scuffle broke out between aging criminals over sex industry protection money before leading them to the Fujizuka cult mound fenced inside a backyard shrine. I chaperoned them through the more intimidating public housing developments; usually deserted, the source of their discomfort is less so the residents and more the Stalinist architecture. I brought them to inspect nagaya, those corrugated-tin-sided rowhouses awaiting demolition. I aspired to reveal history otherwise buried, like the bones that came to the surface when foundations were dug around Minami-Senju Station, where the crematoria and execution grounds once presided. Most visitors walking north of Asakusa fail to connect the dots between the concentration of public housing developments there and the area’s history as a refuge for burakumin outcasts, who could break the taboo on working with leather and would live in cheap municipal areas undesirable to developers.
“Araki shot pictures for Midori here,” I have told more than one of my guests in Yoshiwara Park, “and now the soapland girls come here to pose for their daily photo diaries.” Around the corner, I pointed out the gory pictures beside the statue of the Bodhisattva Kannon. “Kawabata came here in 1923,” I said, “right after the earthquake, walking with Akutagawa, and wrote about the hundreds of corpses of the courtesans and their children, boiled alive in the pond as the fire swept through the pleasure quarter.” I took my guests for tepid coffee gelatin and slices of buttered milk bread at kissaten between blaring televisions and demented proprietors. I pushed crocks of monkfish stew under their chins, pointing out how the gelatin rendered from skin of the fish made for an exquisitely rich broth, which could only be cleaned from the palate by buckwheat shochu. I used to end the tours I gave of East Tokyo at the site of the old labor market, or yoseba, in Irohakai. Some people knew the place by reputation. They had streamed Yama—Attack to Attack (1985), the documentary about neighborhood activism, famous for bringing down the rage of organized crime and resulting in the murder of its original director during the production of the film, as well as his replacement after Yama’s completion. Even if the neighborhood was no longer called Sanya (city authorities scrubbed it from maps in the 1960s), some of my guests knew that name from reading about labor struggles.
Sanya provided the foundation for a city now divided between tourists and guest workers. After the Second World War, the men who arrived from the impoverished rural regions of the north became permanent residents for its cheap proximity to Ueno Station, where the trains dropped them off. The crowded welfare barracks set up by the American occupation were taken over by landlords who carved them up to accommodate even more. The yoseba at Sanya functioned as an auction for human beings. Construction firms listed how many of each particular sort of worker they needed every workday—ten men with experience pouring concrete, say, and twenty more unskilled laborers—and labor brokers descended on the slums before dawn to negotiate their wages.
The economic miracle fizzled. Sanya became a refuge for the homeless, a place for ward governments to redirect vagrants. The yoseba declined but never went away altogether. Foreign workers joined the natives in hoping for work, but by the time I began coming to Irohakai, there were only a handful of elderly men standing around. The mobbed-up labor brokers had been replaced by subcontractors or man-and-a-van renovation guys. I noticed only a few foreigners, probably Bengali or Nepali. There are better places to find employment. The men who ran the flophouses and hostels had to adapt. Now they collect a daily housing allowance granted by the government from the demobilized migrant workers. They filled the rest of their beds with sightseers. Sanya, despite being one of the poorest sections of the city, became a tourist destination. It is cheap, within walking distance of Asakusa, and close enough to a Yamanote or Hibiya Line station.
My tour reminded them that Tokyo was just as cruel as anywhere else. “All of this will be gone soon!” I said. I meant it as a lament. They may have been relieved.
As I told my visitors, when I first arrived in Tokyo, the arcade had a roof, which the ward government and the developers since conspired to demolish, in part to stop the homeless from sitting under it. I claimed that this had once been a place that stank of urine in the summer. I claimed that I had seen activists leading a march to the police station on the corner. I wondered what I remembered and what I had only picked up from Oyama Shiro’s memoir of drifting through the neighborhood. They wanted to see the neon streets of the bubble economy years, still preserved in American media. They wanted to catch the girls in outrageous dresses posing in Harajuku for FRUiTS magazine’s freelancers taking “street snaps” like it was twentysomething years ago. They wanted, even if it would be gauche to admit, to play out their Lost in Translation Charlotte-and-Bob fantasies in a rundown karaoke box in a hip neighborhood. They wanted to see the sentos converted from bathhouses into art galleries. My tour reminded them that Tokyo was just as cruel as anywhere else. “All of this will be gone soon!” I said. I meant it as a lament. They may have been relieved.
Miserable Miracle
If history is any guide, temporary residents will be swept away via deportations or pogroms, or when the next generation moves to the nicer parts of the city. Enclaves may never fill in for neighborhoods, but neighborhoods themselves do not last. Tokyo is a young city relative to many other foreign capitals, having only become a center of power after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. There is little left of the old world, as most of the city was burnt or knocked down in the twentieth century. Curtis LeMay torched and demolished sixteen square miles with his B-29s. People were displaced. The city expanded again.
In my neighborhood, most of the native Japanese came from somewhere else over the course of a generation—down from the north to work on the reconstruction of the city, or from the vast, sprawling suburbs. They claim distant hometowns that they may never have visited, where their ancestors are buried. The shrine festivals of East Tokyo are attended by the new young couples, but there are too few dedicated locals left to observe the rites, so the miko tasked with handing out amulets in their white gowns are girls recruited through temporary labor websites, while stout country boys are hired to carry the mikoshi in the procession. The Japanese residents of my building are mostly old widows who arrived in the city after the war and whose children have relocated in favor of work and easier commutes. They have no real need to stay here and could be just as happy in Akabane, Minowa, or Machiya as they are in Shitaya. The Edokko—someone whose roots in the city go back four generations or so—have always been rare. It is hard to find a number for them, but a single percent of the population is probably optimistic.
The prospect of being expelled from the city is terrifying. The residents who grouse to newspapermen about the sound of plastic wheels on the sidewalk hate the city, but they are more afraid of their shallow roots being dug up, of towers and chain coffee shops burying all traces of their existence. In a nation that gathers around Tokyo like the last torch in the encroaching dark, being asked to quit the city for a wretched exurban stretch of pachinko parlors and family restaurants amounts to exile, even if we’re talking about the native soil of one’s own parents or grandparents. A government policy that offered cash in exchange for relocating out of the city was deemed a failure, and with good reason: to leave Tokyo would be to give up on the dream of Japan’s reconstruction, when the dignity and wealth of the nation was worth any sacrifice, when everyone was told they were witnessing a miracle.
Japan was a miracle! The transformation from a bloody empire to a placid failed democracy is remarkable—even more so because the Allied Occupation left war criminals in charge. Its carefully managed postwar economy was a behemoth. Moderate prosperity and lifetime employment was guaranteed if you could tolerate the strictures of corporate life. But the men in charge put it all on black, went bust, and made up their losses selling off what remained to foreign capital; Japanese socialism—the command economy responsible for public housing, employment-for-life, and fast trains—was dismantled. Japan became hopeless, and the promised renewal has never come to pass.
Foreign labor has become harder to attract, as Japan grows poorer while its neighbors become wealthier.
And so, everyone is looking backward. The guest worker wants to relive the dream of the 1980s, when they could wash ashore in Japan from Fuzhou or Tehran and entertain hopes of striking it rich and returning home loaded down with foreign currency. The budget tourists photographing the maid café touts in Akihabara; the sex tourists in Kabukicho; the solemn, well-dressed tourists in the Andaz lobby; the busloads of elderly European tourists disembarking behind Senso-ji; and the long-term sightseers who call themselves expatriates—they are no less nostalgic. They want the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan they dreamed of when they were children (and not to be told that four Lost Decades have gone by), to visit temples and shrines and castles (and not to be told that they were built within their lifetimes), to walk in the arcades and pause to take in the labor of an old woman in the window of a senbei shop (and not to be told that her building will be replaced by a business hotel with a My Basket on the first floor), to feel as if they have come to a place that is better for having preserved what the rest of the world has lost.
Neo Tokyo
I started meeting those important strangers who reached out to me in the perfumed lobbies of luxury hotels or in restaurants on the upper stories of Nihonbashi and Ginza department stores, choosing the sorts of places that a kyabakura hostess might take a client on a pre-shift dohan date, gorging herself on steak and champagne before marching the man triumphantly into her establishment to be drained again. They were still disappointed, but only with my incoherence when I was called on to hold forth on the city or the people, my inability to remember names, and my doomsaying about the urbanist paradise. My guests didn’t want to hear that the future here, as everywhere, was human trafficking and budget tourism. Eating pigeon in the satellite branch of a Hong Kong barbecue shop on the upper floor of a crystalline tower, nobody wanted to be lectured about the replacement of housing projects and migrant worker slums with Mori Building retail-residential complexes. Political and business elites are enthusiastic for foreigners to solve the demographic collapse, prop up flaccid service sector consumption, and reheat the real estate market. As those claiming citizenship pass from the city, its neighborhoods can be optimized by city planners working for property developers, reconstituted with temporary residents who make fewer demands and who, if necessary, can be exsanguinated from the body politic.
Tokyo is preparing for such a future. But foreign labor has become harder to attract, as Japan grows poorer while its neighbors become wealthier. For tourism numbers to recover to their pre-pandemic peak, let alone grow, the yen would have to be kept at a price that drags down the rest of the economy—to say nothing of the difficulty of guaranteeing geopolitical and ecological stability. The future will only come when people abandon their faith in Sustainable Development Goals and omotenashi, or in the wisdom of converting red-light districts to duty-free shopping zones and knocking the roofs off the arcades to accommodate more hotels. At that point, there will no longer be enough physical or spiritual remnants to credibly resurrect even the least romantic visions of the past. Those left behind—the grandchildren of the enclaves and the less ambitious products of the expatriate neighborhoods, the returnees from exile in suburbia, those who have held on—will face the problem of what is to be done with a city transformed to maximize investor confidence. An old society in a poorer country served by young people who have come from far away is one that must look elsewhere for new sources of hope. That is why I stay. If it is true—this time, after so many false starts—that Tokyo is the future, I would like to know what that means.