Places in Tokyo that feel like Night City

Night City is in California, but part of it came from Tokyo. When CD Projekt Red built it, the team named Tokyo among the real cities it took references from, next to Los Angeles, Detroit and Hong Kong.

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games and I played it on the Switch 2 before the trip. In Tokyo I kept running into pieces of it.

The borrowing started long before the game.

The name was in Japan first. William Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984 and opens in Chiba, where Night City is the district on the edge of town in which nothing is legal and most of it is tolerated.

Four years later Mike Pondsmith published Cyberpunk, the tabletop game 2077 is built on. He hadn't read Neuromancer yet — his sources were Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired and Blade Runner — and he still ended up with a Night City of his own on the California coast. One of the corporations running his world, Arasaka, is Japanese and headquartered in Tokyo. Night City only gets a branch office — with a tower attached.

That was the eighties. In 1989 alone, Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi Estate bought Rockefeller Center, and the future looked like it would be run from Tokyo. Across the river from Asakusa, the golden flame Philippe Starck put on top of the Asahi building went up the same year.

The Asahi flame and the Skytree, from Asakusa

Science fiction wrote that future down and kept it long after the economy changed its mind.

Shinjuku Station splits the neighborhood in two and both halves are in the game.

East of the station is Kabukichō — karaoke, pachinko, bars and signs stacked up the side of every building all the way to the roof. My favorite shisha bar is on the top floor of one of them. Since 2015, a Godzilla head has been looking down at all of it from the Shinjuku Toho Building.

In Night City it's Japantown in Westbrook: gaming parlors, street food, capsule hotels and Jig-Jig Street, with the Tyger Claws running the lot. The district next door in Watson is called Kabuki.

Across from the east exit, a giant cat has been leaning out of a curved screen since 2021. It's a flat screen pretending to be 3D, and from the crowd below the trick works. Standing under it at night is a scene straight out of Blade Runner 2049.

West of the station, Omoide Yokochō is a few narrow alleys of yakitori counters and bars with a handful of seats each. It started as a black market in the late 1940s, selling food and drinks that were hard to find anywhere else after the war. Kabuki is Night City's biggest black market. Omoide Yokochō started the same way and ended up selling yakitori.

Further west the signs give way to towers. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is Kenzo Tange's: 48 floors, split into two towers at the top, opened in 1991. At night it's lit in colors that would fit right in over Corpo Plaza.

In Night City, a building like that belongs to Arasaka. In Tokyo, it's city hall.

Shibuya is the one people come to watch. Every time the lights change, the cars stop in every direction at once and the crossing in front of the station fills from all sides, under screens that never stop playing ads.

Cyberpunk 2077 on PC has a setting called Crowd Density. Shibuya doesn't have a setting. It's on high all the time.

Pacifica is the one I had to leave Tokyo for.

In the game, it's Night City's stretch of coast: a resort district whose investors pulled out halfway through building it. The hotels and malls were left half-finished and the Voodoo Boys moved in.

Kamakura is about an hour from Tokyo by train. It sits on Sagami Bay, which opens onto the same ocean. The beach at Yuigahama had surfers walking out with their boards. The hills behind it are temples, and the Great Buddha has sat in the open since 1498, when a tsunami washed away the hall built around it.

Night City's coast lost its investors and gave up. Kamakura's lost a roof and kept the Buddha.

For three years, the trains in Night City were scenery. They ran overhead and you couldn't get on. Patch 2.1 opened the NCART metro in December 2023 — five lines, 19 stations — but the city is still built around the car.

Tokyo is built around the train. The metro, JR, the private lines, the train to Kamakura — one card covers all of them, which is a post of its own.

Everything cyberpunk took from Tokyo is still there: the neon, the signs climbing the buildings, the towers and the alleys that started as black markets. What it didn't take is the part that keeps the city running.

Night City kept the neon and patched in the trains.