Re-scripting the city: Tokyo from ugly duckling to cool cat

Tokyo's insertion into the ranks of world economic and cultural centres alongside New York, London and Paris was both sudden and dramatic. The mechanics that gave rise to the material transformation of the city are by now well known. Little, however, has been said about the discursive process that saw Tokyo re-scripted as one of the world's ‘capitals of cool’, an enduring change that resisted the long economic downturn. This transformation has been facilitated through the use of a series of images and metaphors that appear and reappear in textual descriptions. In this article, I re-create the play and counter-play that lies behind these metaphors, and in doing so group them into three overall tropes: Tokyo as city of villages; Tokyo as city of transience; and Tokyo as textual city. I argue that each of these tropes can be read as a ‘positive’ equivalent of a previously (and sometimes contemporaneously) existing negative counterpart and that in each of them lies a reference point to the Other of Western cities. Tokyo, I conclude, stands re-scripted as an exemplar of a new sui generis urbanism.