Tokyo is one of the world’s largest cities. “Great Tokyo”, as referred to the enormous urban area that includes the metropolis and many of the surrounding towns, counts 33 million inhabitants, with an average density of 8.817 people per square kilometer. About 43% of all families, however, are made up of only one person. Solitude, in Japan, is respected: eating alone has no shade of loneliness to it, much like the nightlife (drinking alone is not uncommon), travelling on a train full of people with nobody saying a word, or challenging luck on a pachinko in a gaming room. Walking around Tokyo it’s easy to be swept away by in a vortex of lights and deafening sounds coming out of the thousands of gaming rooms spread all over the city. The “arcade experience” is a cultural trademark of Japan. Game rooms and pachinkos (1.252 in the urban area alone) are places to meet and get entertained, with no type of moral and social judgement attached. To give an idea of how much this practice is eradicated in the Japanese daily life, suffice to think that the pachinko business volume between 1991 and 2011 reached the estimated monster amount of 5.547 trillion euros: a Japanese person out of every five plays it on an almost daily base, four out of ten play from three to six hours at a time. One seeks refuge in these places for many different reasons: to relax after a stressful day in severely hierarchical workplaces; to detach oneself from the routine of family life; to get a taste of loneliness and feel free from the pressures of speaking and interacting with others. These cultural habits add up to the alienation that often ensues from the rapid adoption of new technology: 24 million smartphone owners (as of June 2012) are ever more connected to the virtual world and less to the real one. This future city scenario thus becomes the perfect background for the dualism that has become the trademark of our times; a city where million of people move around becoming a tragic personification of the ongoing struggle between global connection and local solitude.
