When night falls in Tokyo, the neon lights are full on. In the up-market area of Shinjuku, colourful beams of light race up and down the facades of buildings.
The streets are teeming with people and the window fronts of the electronics stores are full of TV screens all tuned to the same channel. The air is full of the delicious smell wafting from a yakitori fast-food restaurant.
Tokyo feels like the urbane lifestyle cranked up into overdrive.
A first-time visitor to Tokyo will be confronted with a plethora of impressions. The young bloods in this very expensive part of Tokyo wear boots and elaborately gelled hairstyles. Society ladies toddle along the pavement in high heels, armed with expensive handbags.
The entertainment district of Kabukicho is packed with nightclubs, Karaoke bars and love hotels with translucent windows through which no eye can pierce. It's a place of maximum anonymity in a metropolis of 35 million people.
As soon as you land in Tokyo you get the impression you have travelled 10 years into the future. Nowhere is that feeling so intense as at Shinjuku station. About 3.5 million people pass through the complex every day.
It's a warren of platforms, escalators and endless corridors. And yet everything runs smoothly and orderly. No one barges and passengers stand patiently in line waiting for trains.
Standing in stark contrast to the capital city is Kyoto. If you travel there by Shinkansen high-speed train, you arrive in a railway station with a 500-metre-long, glass-roofed atrium.
But as soon as you leave the building and step into the streets you feel as if you have travelled back into the pre-modern era.
High-rise buildings are banned from Kyoto. Instead the city has so many temples, palaces, shrines and zen gardens that it would take weeks to visit them all.