Wards of Neo-Tokyo
Welcome to Tokyo, the city I was born in, exiled from, and
have recently returned to. I’m going to be straight with you:
there’s no way I could give you the full scan on this city. The
Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area—known more commonly as
Neo-Tokyo—is an urban megasprawl covering more than twenty
thousand square kilometers, and it’s home to nearly a third of the
entire Japanese population. It is an urban sea that has swallowed
cities respectable in their own rights and incorporated them into
its larger metro-mass.
I simply can’t cover all of it. But what I will do is give you the details on the more important parts of it, the core cities that make up the real power centers in the capital of the Japanese Empire. When I say “cities,” I’m being accurate: each of these municipal wards has its own government, including its own mayor and assembly. Sprawl-wide services are managed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which today exists only to hand over contracts to the corporations. There will be more on that later.
Super-expressways cut wide arteries through the urban jungle, threading into a dense multi-level network of urban streets. But at its heart, Neo-Tokyo remains a city centered around railroad lines. The earthquakes of the last decade forced Tokyo to bring its train system above-ground, but a busy monorail station is still the central fixture of every ward. Th anks to the Neo-Tokyo Restoration Act, subways are out and elevated maglev is in. Dozens of elevated maglev rails circle and crisscross the city, and computerized, rapid-acceleration trains have cut commute times in half. Many elevated station platforms can be reached from street level by escalators, but some are located inside skyscrapers and arcologies.
From the air, it appears as if the train stations have created islands in a sea of concrete; dense ranges of skyscrapers have built up around these focal points of public transportation. Those are the concentrations of Japanese people and power that I’ll be covering here.
I simply can’t cover all of it. But what I will do is give you the details on the more important parts of it, the core cities that make up the real power centers in the capital of the Japanese Empire. When I say “cities,” I’m being accurate: each of these municipal wards has its own government, including its own mayor and assembly. Sprawl-wide services are managed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which today exists only to hand over contracts to the corporations. There will be more on that later.
The Fly-over View
Modern Neo-Tokyo grew out of a flood plain, a swampy convergence of rivers emptying into Tokyo Bay. The rice paddies have since been replaced by skyrakers, and the capital has stretched out in every direction to absorb over thirty other cities. A massive civil engineering miracle under the city keeps the floodwaters out, and many artificial islands fill in Tokyo Bay across to Chiba and as far south as Kawasaki.Super-expressways cut wide arteries through the urban jungle, threading into a dense multi-level network of urban streets. But at its heart, Neo-Tokyo remains a city centered around railroad lines. The earthquakes of the last decade forced Tokyo to bring its train system above-ground, but a busy monorail station is still the central fixture of every ward. Th anks to the Neo-Tokyo Restoration Act, subways are out and elevated maglev is in. Dozens of elevated maglev rails circle and crisscross the city, and computerized, rapid-acceleration trains have cut commute times in half. Many elevated station platforms can be reached from street level by escalators, but some are located inside skyscrapers and arcologies.
From the air, it appears as if the train stations have created islands in a sea of concrete; dense ranges of skyscrapers have built up around these focal points of public transportation. Those are the concentrations of Japanese people and power that I’ll be covering here.
The Japanese obsession with trains has allowed them to conveniently forget some of the deadly disasters that took place during Crash 2.0. There were more than a few train collisions, and in some cases faulty safety locks sent trains careening into the streets below.
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