Tokyo, Again, Always

Someone at 3sat has a Japan obsession and I’m deeply grateful for it. The channel reliably produces documentaries about Tokyo that make me want to cancel everything and book a flight—which is either great programming or deeply irresponsible television, possibly both.

The latest is journalist Stephan Düfel’s portrait of daily life in the Japanese capital, structured around a handful of chapters, each peeling back a different layer of the city. He visits families living in anonymous high-rise towers who reach out to strangers precisely because the scale of the buildings makes human contact feel impossible. He follows office workers who pour their anxieties into after-work drinking at izakayas, not so much enjoying themselves as managing themselves. And then there are the more vivid figures—the ones who’ve found their corner of Shinjuku or Yoyogi or Shibuya and made it weird and warm and theirs.

What Düfel captures, without overdoing it, is the permanent tension between the city’s density and its loneliness. Tokyo has tens of millions of people and somehow manages to feel, to many of them, like a place where nobody sees you. That paradox is the city’s central mystery, and no documentary fully resolves it—not this one, not any of them. Which is part of why Tokyo stays with me the way it does. You think you understand it and then you watch something like this and realize you’ve barely started.