“Vicarious nostalgia” is today’s watch-phrase. Someone else’s old-timey symbol of a hopeful future, or something like that — specifically, the future that the city seems to have imagined for itself in 1958. Near the dedicatory Shinto shrine  in the mid-height Main Observatory, there’s playing on a loop a very well-edited video explaining the history and sentiments that drove the construction of the Tower. The aesthetic concept of “cool” developed in disaster-prone Edo-cum-Tokyo, it declares! Umm, really?

Otherwise, the experience very much reminds me of similar edifices that I have visited, with their own observation decks and rotating restaurants and view platforms. Seattle’s Space Needle, Toronto’s CN Tower, the Vancouver Lookout, Paris’ Eiffel…been to them all.  Obviously I find something beguiling in these things, despite a lifetime’s familiarity with aerial views. The vista from a high static point is different, somehow, from the sort of perspective obtained in a moving aircraft.

And the Tower is certainly distinct in that the panorama encompasses the largest city in the world in the year 2025, in terms of area and population. Despite the helpful QR codes on the windows and the linked explanatory website, I quickly lost track of cardinal directions. On a good clear day you could orient yourself towards Fuji-san, but today Tokyo clothed itself in more typical overcast and haze, and its tutelary volcano might as well be situated on another planet. There’s the milky water in one direction, a somewhat denser collection of ‘scrapers in another (with the tip of the newer observation-television tower, the 2012 Tokyo Skytree, peeking over). But beyond the sprawl of high and medium rises, the occasional dull green of a park or strand of an elevated traffic artery — no matter in which direction I turned — I was confronted by endless blocks of the city fading into the misty yellowish distance. 

To conventional thinking that composite prospect should be considered dystopian, I suppose, but I rather like it. This isn’t the future they imagined in 1958, but does it matter? A seemingly-infinite city is one of seemingly-infinite possibilities.