That Ridiculous Red Tower

Tokyo Tower is 333 meters of borrowed symbolism—its silhouette lifted from the Eiffel Tower, its paint a red-orange that reads from half the city away, its construction in 1958 a deliberate statement that Japan had rebuilt itself and intended to keep going. It has been destroyed, threatened, and atmospherically loomed over in approximately a hundred films and anime since. In person it’s both smaller than you expect and stranger: a structure with no obvious practical reason to be beautiful, and yet somehow it is. Standing under it at night with the lights on, you get exactly what Tokyo occasionally decides to give you—that particular mixture of scale and warmth the city offers when it’s feeling generous.