Home to approximately one tenth of the total citizenry of all of Tokyo’s 23 wards, Setagaya houses 800,000 people, the same figure as the population for the entire island of Oahu, Hawaii. At both places, people seem to have come in waves. Thirty thousand ...

Taxi drivers claim that, unless you’ve lived there all your life, Setagaya is nearly impossible to navigate. Major thoroughfares pulse straight across the second largest of Tokyo’s 23 wards, but off the highway a maze of tapering, winding one-way alleys will often as not ...

Arakawa Ward snuggles like a puzzle piece in the bends of the Sumida River. The third smallest of Tokyo’s 23 wards, it has an intimate, unpretentious atmosphere that matches the attitude of many of its residents. Asked what makes Arakawa special, locals and even ...

Anyone with more than a week in Tokyo has spent some time with Shibuya’s mascot, Hachiko, waiting and watching thousands of individuals merge on cue into a tsunami of mass determination and consumerism, a scramble of humanity. Life’s big questions can surface at such ...

Sumida Ward spans an area that has endured ruinous fires, floods, plagues, and seismic as well as economic jostlings. Residents of this battered part of the city nonetheless have always kept their pride buoyant and their spirits aloft. Even when the chips are down, ...

July and August are brutally hot across most of Japan, and for parents with young children at home, the challenge is on to somehow enjoy the summer without getting bitten, burned or bummed out. My neighbor’s solution was to build a loose replica of ...

Do you have daikon ashi (giant-radish legs)? Let’s hope not, as the Japanese metaphor usually applies to fat, lard-white and water-laden gams. If the daikon in question is from Nerima, however, it’s no insult, as the northwestern ward’s famous daikon is a long, slender ...

To keep Tokyo high and dry, management of local river and water resources has been always been a key concern, and to this key, Kita Ward holds the locks. Sluice-gate locks, that is. Residents of the Kita area once built mizuya (homesteads perched on ...

Suginami Ward may be known as a bed town, but the residents are restless. Butting up against Musashino and Mitaka cities and sharing a “west wing” location with Setagaya Ward to the south and Nerima Ward to the north, what appears to be a ...

Squeezed between the Sumida and Arakawa rivers, sliced with canals, and facing Tokyo Bay, Koto Ward is sometimes known as the “Venice of Tokyo.” While the comparison is a considerable stretch — many of the canals have been filled in or obscured by buildings ...

There’s no better word than “counter” to encapsulate Nakano, a ward in Western Tokyo. It’s an area of counterculture, counterintelligence, casino-card counters and, of course, lunch counters; perhaps even a place where you might find your counterpart in life. Take counterintelligence for starters. Nakano ...

Outsiders often associate Adachi, Tokyo’s northernmost ward, with the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult (still in residence), the recent Tobu Railway Co.’s Takenotsuka crossing accident that cost two women their lives, or the fact that the ward’s alluvial ground makes it especially vulnerable if an ...