Tokyo New City Guide. Mayumi Yoshida Barakan

      INTRODUCTION

      June 1996

      Fifteen years ago, when I first came to Japan from America, I didn't buy a guidebook to the city. The books available directed the tourist to bus tours, expensive imported designer boutiques in Ginza, to ancient nightclubs and cabarets. It was just intuition at the time, but I knew there must be more than that going on in Tokyo, and I decided to find out what it was.

      Over the years Mayumi and I have guided hundreds of friends through the city. We became experts at drawing maps and running off copied handouts on where to go, what to do, and where to find what. It was always fun, always great to see people get as excited about the city as we were. Still, we often wished that there was a single volume, collecting all the information, that we could give to visitors. The book should have been published long ago, and when no one else did it, we decided to do it ourselves.

      In the past few years Tokyo has received more good PR overseas than any other city in the world. More and more people are coming to the city, most of them with different reasons and expectations from those that people came with ten or even five years ago. For some, the city is disappointingly westernized; for others, it's a super-technopolis of the future. For yet others it's simply frustrating. But few people fail to be intrigued, if not captivated, by the curious combination of new technology, internationalism, traditional behavior and aesthetics, and the cross-cultural kitsch that make up Tokyo's special brand of urban life.

      The city casts its spell over even the most adamantly unhappy of its foreign residents. Conversations here turn with an almost predictable frequency to Japan and the Japanese. Much of the talk consists of complaints, accusations, stories about silly Mr. Suzuki, or games of one-upmanship as to who has read the most hysterical, the most bizarre, or the most obscene misprinted English phrase of the day. But whether arising from love or hate, the fascination never dies.

      The repertoire of complaints is fairly standardized: the ugliness of the city; people rudely pushing and shoving their way through crowds; the noise pollution; the difficulty of getting around with no consistent system of addresses or street names; the constant pointing and staring at foreigners and the audible "gaijin da!" ("It's a foreigner!"); the pervasive belief that foreigners can't learn the impossible Japanese language. But most vehemently criticized is the general sense of regimentation and the overall lack of individuality in the people—the inability to do anything that doesn't go by the rules or isn't decided after lengthy discussion with the "group."

      The criticisms are at least partially justified, the frustrations undeniable. You can go into a coffee shop and order

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