Ramen at midnight, cherry blossoms at dawn, and more Michelin stars than Paris and New York combined
The largest city on Earth (37 million in the metro) and the most Michelin-starred in the world — over 200 stars, more than Paris and New York combined. Tokyo's food culture is built around shokunin: the artisan who devotes an entire career to the perfection of a single craft. The ramen cook who has been refining the same tonkotsu broth for 40 years. The tempura master who fries in the same oil temperature, in the same sequence, every service. The result is a city where even a 700-yen convenience store onigiri is made with more care than most restaurant food elsewhere.
Edo (now Tokyo) was a fishing village until 1603 when Tokugawa Ieyasu established the shogunate there, making it Japan's de facto capital while the Emperor remained in Kyoto. Renamed Tokyo ("Eastern Capital") in 1868 when Emperor Meiji moved there. The city was almost entirely destroyed twice — by the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 (105,000 dead) and by US incendiary bombing raids in 1945 — and rebuilt each time, which is why little architecture predating 1945 survives.