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 was once the home of the infamous Rikugun Nakano Gakko (The Nakano Military School), Japan's top-secret training facility for elite undercover specialists. Just last year, what appears to be the only surviving manual outlining the techniques taught by the school -- from poisoning to propaganda -- was unearthed.
All written documents from the school, established in 1938, were supposed to have been systematically destroyed after World War II, but ex-trainee Tsuhei Saito found the manual tucked in with personal effects sent to his home 60 years ago by a colleague. The octogenarian decided that revealing the manual to the media would set the record straight, finally, on what really went on at the school.