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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

As a european i got into the habbit of walking between popular city neighborhoods to find hidden gems. I did that in Tokyo, and that was a really big mistake. I ended up walking next to a huge higway, looking at bland buildings for like 20 minutes, feeling completely lost in the middle of nowhere.

I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that tokyo wasn't one big city but in fact tenth of small cities linked together.

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That is kind of what it is, yes: "Tokyo Metropolis [which] consists of 23 special wards and 39 other, ordinary municipalities (cities, towns, and villages). [...] Today, all wards refer to themselves as a city in English, but the Japanese designation of special ward (tokubetsu-ku) remains unchanged" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo)

Some of these wards consist of high rise buildings only, some are residential areas with hidden alleys and family-friendly environment. As a fellow European who lived in Tokyo for one year, I cannot support your statement but your experience walking around highly depends on where in Tokyo you are. For some wards, you are probably entirely correct. However, other wards allow for the experience shared by others here.

It is, in fact, a cluster of municipalities. Tokyo isn't considered a city anymore but a megalopolis.

Per Wikipedia:

  Since 2001, Tokyo consists of 62 municipalities: 23 special wards, 26 cities, 5 towns and 8 villages. Any municipality of Japan has a directly elected mayor and a directly elected assembly, each elected on independent four-year cycles.

It's interesting to see when you cross from "neighborhood" to "neighborhood", how things change as if you were in the outskirts of a city and then back to a busy center again.

Yeah it eas the wrong technique, the interesting stuff is public transit and commerce driven. So there are a million JR and subway stops. If you got off at every single stop in existence and walked concentric circles around it, you'd find out the relative importance of each station as a destination and or transit hub and you'd find everything interesting and know exactly when to stop making bigger circles around a station by the reduction in things to see. And that's still an incredible mind blowing amount of land area you'd have to walk

I’ve walked Tokyo a lot, and I think you’re drawing an odd conclusion from a sample size of 1.

Walking between any of the popular neighborhoods in Tokyo, I’m surprised you managed that.

Even if you are walking on a large road, you can basically always jump to a smaller parallel road to arrive back in wonderland.

Tokyo is basically centered along an orbital railway line, so if you were to walk out from this line that you would be basically walking to the suburbs with suburban highway roads to take you to the outskirts. And furthermore Tokyo is indeed based along walkable neighborhoods that are grouped into cities.

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