Minato-ku Sunset

My father asked me the other day what the skyline in Tokyo looks like. The city is too large to have a single skyline. It is more like Los Angeles that has a separate skyline for each city in the surrounding county. There was a beautiful sunset this evening at the office, so I took a few photographs.

This is one part of the skyline for Minato-ku (港区). The word ku (区) means city or ward in Japanese, so Minato-ku, Minato City, or Minato Ward are fine. The other character, 港, mean harbour. Oddly, it is the second Chinese character for the city Hongkong. The first means fragrant. (No joke.)

Tokyo is an old place by Japanese standards. While the city was only formed completely in the 1940s, the area already had twenty three cities. These were combined to create a supercity along with western suburbs. Years later, tiny islands far to the south -- hundreds of miles -- were also added. The twenty-three kus of Tokyo has about eight million people, and the remaining metropolitan area contains about four million people. These central wards have a population density roughly half Manhattan (13,000/km2 vs. 25,000/km2).

In Tokyo, a forty story building is considered very tall. There are none with more than sixty. Most building are six to ten stories. With the exclusion of the temple in the foreground of this photograph, very little of Tokyo is open space. (I have written extensively about this in prior posts.) This, along with its scattered, poorly planned architecture, gives its a distinctively industrial feel. Few foreigners would come to Tokyo and declare it an architecturally beautiful city.