How to pretend you're in Tokyo: Movies, music and food that transport

Travel

How to pretend you're in Tokyo: Movies, music and food that transport

That Tokyo trip volition have to look for the millions of people who cancelled flights and hotel bookings. But there are ways to bring you lot closer to this sometimes impenetrable, always fascinating urban center.

A few years agone, I walked through Tokyo's neon-lit streets for the first time, wide-eyed and jet-lagged.

Information technology only took three days to learn some of the metropolis's secrets. If you can't detect the perfect noodle store for tiffin, for example, look up and you volition run into another dozen options, filling the upper floors of what you thought were office buildings. Or that famous places – like Shibuya Crossing, the intersection you've seen in 100 timelapses – are famous for a reason, just at that place's so much more than to learn by picking a metro cease at random and going for a long walk.

This was supposed to exist a large year for tourism for the city – already one of the globe's nearly visited – as it was set to host the at present-postponed Olympics and Paralympic Games. That, of course, did not happen.

With most of the world still confined to their homes, that Tokyo trip will have to wait for the millions of people who cancelled flights and hotel bookings. In the meantime, there are means to capture the spirit of a sometimes impenetrable, ever fascinating, metropolis. Perhaps, just for a dark, these recommendations might even brand you feel like yous are there.

(Photo: Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times)

HEAR THE CITY

I first met Kazuto Okawa, who performs nether the name LLLL, outside a convenience store in the quirky neighbourhood of Koenji on my first night in Tokyo. He was sitting on a curb in a circle of friends, his face obscured by long, disheveled hair. Over the years since that first encounter, his music – a blend of sugary pop hooks and space-age soundscapes – has become synonymous with the metropolis for me. If those conflicting feelings of disorientation and joy that hit every visitor to Tokyo could exist translated to sound, this would be information technology.

When I asked Mr Okawa what music all-time captures his home city, he directed me to the classics. The musician Keigo Oyamada, amend known equally Cornelius, is sometimes reductively chosen the "Japanese Beck" for the mode he swoops betwixt genres with ease. Every album is a journey, but for the nigh evocative of the metropolis, Mr Okawa suggests his 1995 album "69/96." "Information technology's forever futuristic," he said. "A perfect match to Tokyo."

If Cornelius is as well out there for you, Mr Okawa recommends "Kazemachi Roman" by Tokyo folk rock pioneers Happy Stop: You may recognise a vocal from the soundtrack to that great tribute to Tokyo, Lost in Translation.

To begin understanding the miracle that is Tokyo'southward J-popular scene, Mr Okawa says to start with Sheena Ringo'southward "Kabukicho no joou." "It captures the dark side of the metropolis," he said. "And it happens to exist one of the most popular J-pop songs of all fourth dimension." For the flip side of the aforementioned pop money – peradventure it's a more lively summertime night yous are trying to recreate – he recommends Taeko Ohnuki's aptly titled "Sunshower."

Melt AT THE DINNER TABLE

No trip to Tokyo is complete without a whole lot of eating. While it may exist difficult to accurately recreate a bona fide Tokyo bowl of ramen or plate of sushi, in that location is plenty that you can do from home.

Head to New York Times Cooking for a selection of quick and easy dishes, from yakitori (yeah, you really can arrive at domicile) to nori chips (perfect with a common cold Japanese lager).

For something more involved, and seasonally appropriate, follow the lead of Motoko Rich, The Times' Tokyo bureau chief. "With the weather condition getting cooler, it'south time to suspension out the butane burner for shabu shabu, a classic Japanese dinner that you lot tin can make and eat right at the table," she said.

First, make a kombu dashi, a broth flavoured with dried kelp, and then take beef, tofu, vegetables and mushrooms and dip them into the bubbles liquid, making certain to swirl in the ingredients long enough that they cook through. "Although we can melt shabu shabu at home, it also reminds me of fancier mid-20th century-era restaurants in Tokyo, where the servers article of clothing kimonos and carry majestic platters to the tables."

EXPAND YOUR LITERARY HORIZONS

If you lot want to lose yourself in Tokyo past curling upwardly with a good book, we have plenty of recommendations, whether it is a long piece of work of fiction you lot are after or more than snackable short stories. There is more – a lot more than – than Haruki Murakami. Ms Rich recommends Breasts And Eggs past Mieko Kawakami. "I honey the style Kawakami references existent and recognisable, but not exoticised, Tokyo locations," she said. "You feel in the know, reading it, rather than as if you lot are being introduced to a precious Other World. It is Tokyo as it is lived in, not a film set."

Meet THE CITY ON THE SCREEN

If an evening of TV and subtitles is what y'all are after, kickoff with the binge-worthy Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories on Netflix. The evidence is about the customers who pass through a tiny counter-service restaurant that is simply open from midnight to 6am. At turns heartwarming, hilarious and melancholic, information technology is a moving portrait of Tokyo later on nighttime. If the opening championship sequence doesn't make you experience good, check your pulse: It is ASMR for the soul.

When it comes to movies, as Mike Hale, a Times' tv critic, said, "Tokyo is simultaneously the near cosmopolitan and the nigh intensely local metropolis you can imagine, and that'southward a perfect combination for storytelling, as directors from Kurosawa to Kiarostami to Sofia Coppola have shown."

Where to start then? You can't skip Akira Kurosawa, the influential filmmaker whose career spanned most six decades. Mr Hale recommends Stray Domestic dog (1949), shot in Tokyo in the aftermath of Earth War Two. He describes it as "a walking tour of the city in sheer survival mode."

Next, attempt Tokyo Drifter (1966) by Seijun Suzuki. "Suzuki's stylised yakuza story sets traditional themes of accolade and abuse against a jazzy, jagged, surrealist distillation of the quickly changing city," he said.

Finally, for something more than gimmicky, watch the Cannes Palm d'Or-winning Shoplifters (2018) by Hirokazu Kore-eda. In Mr Hale's view, the motion-picture show, about a family of grifters, "shows both the glittering modern city and the shadow earth just beyond the neon."

Become LOST IN THE VIRTUAL Globe

While Japan's about internationally famous video gaming figure may be an Italian plumber with a taste for mushrooms, there are likewise enough of games more grounded in real-life Tokyo than Super Mario Bros. Brian Ashcraft, an Osaka-based senior author at the gaming website Kotaku, recommends the expansive Yakuza series, which follows Kazuma Kiryu as he makes his proper name in the underworld. The Yakuza games are activity-packed, but with dance battles, karaoke sessions and express joy-out-loud dialogue, they are as well unabashedly light-headed. "This year has resulted in all events and trips to Tokyo beingness canned," Mr Ashcraft said. "The Yakuza games practice a fantastic job of bringing parts of the urban center to life. These obsessive, digital recreations mimic the idea of Tokyo. For me, that'south good enough."

How to pretend you're in Tokyo: Movies, music and food that transport

Advertisement