I couldn't read the whole article. Is he talking about 1920s Paris, or 2020s Paris? There's a lot to like about Tokyo, but there is a tendency toward conservatism in nearly all aspects of Japanese society as well.

Ian Buruma - a former bit player in Tokyo's 1970s avant garde art scene who later became a New York Times correspondent - had many observations about this in his recent memoir:

What we had seen at Maro’s rehearsal studio was a very Japanese phenomenon. A theatrical method that had been created by a great artist, through sheer daring and experimentation, had become established as a style, passed on by masters of various schools, all with their own variations. This had happened to the tea ceremony, once a spontaneous expression of aesthetic joy in drinking tea, now a rigid set of rules, to be learned by wealthy ladies who pay a fortune to the various tea ceremony schools. The same thing had happened to classical theater and to flower arranging. And now, in a way, it was happening even to a once avant-garde dance form.

He also returned again and again to the mostly white expatriates he encountered at the time, and some of the characteristics and frustrations of their existence there:

Hovering on the fringes was where I liked to be, neither in nor out, neither one thing nor another, semidetached, a born fellow traveler, a male fag hag, an observer in the midst of sympathetic strangers. It was thrilling, but also a way of playing it safe. Perhaps that was why I was attracted to Japan, a society to which a foreigner could never belong, even if he wanted to.

... He, Donald, felt entirely at ease as an outsider. The great thing about Japan, he said, was that one was left alone. To be Japanese in Japan was to be caught in an almost intolerable web of rules and obligations. But the gaijin was exempt from all that. He could observe life with serene detachment, not being bound to anything or anyone. In Japan, Donald felt utterly, radically free.

[Donald] mentioned the “Seidensticker syndrome,” named after his friend, the scholar Edward Seidensticker. Ed habitually spent half the year in Japan. When he arrived in Tokyo, he was ready to kiss the ground. Everything was wonderful. Then, once he had more or less settled down, he began to get more and more irritated by “these people,” until after six months he was quite ready to go home.