Legend

1. NEZU - my place
2. Shinobazu pond - famous land mark
3. Akihabara - famous for electronic things
4. Ueno - where you'll find the JR station and Ame Yoko
5. Koukyo - the emperors residence
6. Ueno Zoo - Kangaroo's live here

Nezu is a nice place, though I guess that depends on who you ask. There are many old buildings around, as for some reason Nezu escaped much of the fire bombing of WW2. Every weekend you can see folks come around with cameras in hand taking photos' of the place, and it's olde world buildings that were part of old Tokyo. Now before you get carried away with romantic notions of traditional dwellings, you have to get a better picture of what a typical home is like in this area. Sure they look quaint on the outside, especially in drawings, but the fact is that they are small, cramped, and (from an Australian perspective) pooly constructed of thin wood. This is not so much for earthquake protection (just ask the folks in Kobe who were killed enmasse by their collapsing houses) as just pure and simple cost saving construction.

Its a poor photo (scanned from an advertising brochure for real estate sales) but if you look carefully you can see a line of taller buildings in-between 1 and 2 on the photo. This is Kototoi dori (dori means road) and there are many big residences of upwards of 6 floors built along here. This is the newer style of housing, where everyone lives in "Mansions" which have perhaps 2 or 3 rooms. This building along roads, is quite typical here in Tokyo, with things clustered around the major roads into business centers like Akihabara, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Ginza, Shibuya and Roppongi. Driving around the Shyuto Kousoku (ring road) is like driving through a valley, but if you look through the buildings on either side you'll find that there really isn't anything behind that front row.

Peoples perception of Tokyo as being BIG is not quite right, as it depends on the view you have of Tokyo. If you are talking about the city of Tokyo, and not adjcent prefectures like Saitama-ken, Chiba-ken, Kanagawa-ken, then its not that big, smaller than (for example) Brisbane. But it is hard to notice that you've changed city, so it feels huge. People tend to think of the size in terms of the impression of their train rides, or being 45 min by car from one place to another. This is deceptive as I can ride my bicycle from my home at Nezu to Akihabara in less than 15 minutes. This is faster than taking the train. So if you get about by train, you'll often get the impression of things being far, if you drive a car, you'll get the same impression, as the speed limit in town is 40Km/h but in reality, you'll spend a lot of time stopped. I surprise locals when I tell them that I ride my bicycle from Nezu to Akihabara, or from Nezu to Shibuya, in about the same time that the train takes.

BUT look at the top left hand corner of the picture above, its just wall to wall buildings. Density is high. So while you may only travel a kilometer, you've gone through whole different areas, so from this perspective Tokyo is huge. With about 8 million people living in the 23 wards, and untold millions that stream in every day for work, the daytime population of this area could well be more like 17million. Think about that, the entire national population of Australia crammed into the area of Brisbane.

Imagine the garbage pile that 17 million packaging and wrapping addicts can make ... keep an eye out for my visit to Garbage Mountain, as I went to see just what kind of mountain of garbage is made here. Houston, we have a problem.