My name is Fumie Kim. I'm a former intern in [at] CNN. We are now at Kagurazaka.
It is a very local place. You'll never find this place in any kind of guide book.
Believe it or not, the neighborhood used to be much more bigger than Ginza or Shinjuku or Shibuya.
This is the famous shrine in Kagurazaka. This is the red shrine.
Back then there used to be a lot of geishas, entertainers, performers [who] come [came] to this shrine and say [said] their prayers.
I came from Australia three years ago to do a book called Graffiti Japan.
I'm a photographer and graffiti artist.
I would imagine they probably got a couple of thousand dollars to paint,
but often the graffiti artists do it for free as well,
because they're gonna get their work up big in front of everyone in Tokyo.
In Japan there are two types of graffiti work.
You've got the guys who go out bombing and doing it illegal [illegally],
and then you've got the commissioned graffiti work, pieces like this where you can...
you only have to look at it and realize it is actually a serious...uh, an art form.
This kind of stuff is done by professionals, and this kind of work takes years to accomplish,
and that's the difference between people bombing the streets and just writing their name.
There's definitely a cultural buzz happening here which it seems like...
it almost seems like the center of the world for creativity.
Omotesando is essentially Tokyo's fashion parade.
It's a gigantic catwalk for the fashionable and the sophisticated in the city.
You've got the global brands all lining up and down this boulevard.
This is the main drag, the main boulevard, but just behind the first row of buildings --
just in the back streets here -- you find a completely different world.
It's a much more intimate network of little lanes, quirky shops, cafes.
So, it's a much more kind of human quality in the back streets.
Tokyo's an interesting place to live because the buildings are always changing,
I mean much more rapidly than in any other city I've been in. It's almost like they're disposable,
but the pattern of that change seems to be rather stable.
So, it's like a river. You're seeing the water rushing by all the time, but the river is always there.
That's really the best way I can think of the experience of being in Tokyo.
It's like it's continually changing, but it's somehow eternally the same.
Mostly the city looks kind of random and chaotic,
but if you get down to the human scale, it actually gets very sensitive and quite responsive.
It's a kind of a model of what a 21st century city could be.
It feels both traditional but also very, very modern, very contemporary.
And it's actually much more comfortable to live in than I think many people who haven't visited Tokyo might expect.
The Japanese sometimes use the word nurui, which means lukewarm.
It's like a bath that's not too hot, it's not too cold. It's very comfortable to be in.
And in fact, many people never leave.