Forget that Kanto has a GDP bigger than Italy's. What really fills me with a sense of civic pride is the knowledge that my Tokyo is home to the only museum in the world dedicated to laundry.
Of course, it's entirely fitting there should be such a museum here in the capital of a land where godliness is next to cleanliness. And the spiritual father of the Museum of Dry Cleaning and Laundering, after whom its Japanese name is taken [see end], is one Kenji Igarashi.
His name, I suspect, is one that in Japanese dry cleaning and laundering circles is spoken with the kind of reverence normally reserved for royalty, deities or Michael Moore.