The busy street shown here is the fabled Ginza, known worldwide as the world's most expensive shopping street. Like similar streets in global cities (Fifth Avenue, Champs Elysees, Regent Street) Ginza's reputation exceeds what's on offer. The really fashionable shops have long left all these streets and decamped to more exclusive quarters, leaving these streets to the tourists. One reason the Ginza is even less appealing than most of these overhyped "shopping meccas" is the annoying, but understandable, Japanese habit of using all the floors in a building for retail. This is especially obvious in entertainment districts, when bars will be stacked up on every floor of a building. Ginza does the same, with many of the best restaurants buried away high above street level. We did manage to find a very elegant French tea shop tucked away in one of those buildings, but in general it takes the fun out of windowshopping.

That rainy parking lot that Somchai is standing in fronts the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno. Ueno used to be a huge castle and dozens of temples atop a hill, which was used to guard the northern advance to Tokyo. That was all burned down when the emperor returned in the 1860's, and it's not indistinguishable from the rest of the sprawling city. Tokyo's biggest aesthetic problem is it's the world's largest city, with 35 million people, but almost all this activity takes place in low rise buildings. This is practical since the frequent earthquakes would rip tall buildings apart, but it's not an easy logistical exercise to house, employ and entertain 35 million people in small buildings.