NEW YORK — While visiting three capitals in Latin America on a lecture tour earlier this month, I wondered if Tokyo looked or felt like any of these cities to someone visiting it from New York or a large European city half a century ago.
The wonderment, on the face of it, was silly. The three cities — Quito, La Paz and Caracas — are all European in origin. Two of them, La Paz and Quito, are the world's highest and the second-highest capital cities, and have little in common with Tokyo, which stands on alluvial plains.
Yet certain urban disharmonies — for example, the presence of ramshackle houses not far from the downtown where modern, gleaming towers mushroom — made me think of Tokyo of the past.