2025-02-07
32 分钟This is the Guardian.
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go to theguardian.com longread tokyo drift what Happens when a City Stops Being the Future?
By Dylan Levi King read by Kenichiro Thompson the Yen is low and everybody is coming to Tokyo.
If that sounds familiar, it's not because I'm being coy or hedging my bets.
It is the only information to be found
in most English language coverage of Japan's capital in the aftermath of the pandemic.
I can't stop reading these accounts.
After nine years in the country, you'd think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo American Internet,
but I'm afraid I'm stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being.
Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the post war American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth,
good taste and cultural authenticity with a reputation for deferential hospitality.
Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral post war public relations campaigns,
a boom in exportable middlebrow culture and fear mongering about Japanese industrial dominance.
Now, 80 years after the American invasion,
Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple of thousand dollars.
Just as in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads,
or IWU is a modern day Alexandria, a cosmopolitan shipping hub attracting dealers in durables and middlemen from the global South.