On a winter’s afternoon in Tokyo, I look out over the seemingly infinite sprawl of the Japanese capital. This is not the view from one of the city’s sky-high observation decks, mind you, but rather a metropolis in miniature on permanent display in the basement of a nondescript downtown office building. The 1:1000 scale model of Tokyo’s 13 central wards — that’s about 230 square kilometers of cityscape — encompasses everything from the soaring Tokyo Skytree (the world’s tallest broadcast tower) to the donut-shaped Ajinomoto Stadium, all painstakingly re-created from Styrofoam and hand-cut paper.
I’m at the Mori Building Urban Lab, a research facility established by leading Japanese real estate developer Mori Building Co., whose logo crowns skyscrapers all over the city. With
