And that's how the pawnshop became an art gallery. Old Tokyo is undergoing a renaissance. Crafts people, designers and other professionals are discovering the pleasures of living in a neighborhood that still retains much of its heritage. They've grown up surrounded by new, mostly Western things. Rediscovering old Tokyo has become fashionable.
Conservationists can barely believe how things have changed.
For decades, anyone campaigning to preserve a community's links with the past was routinely dismissed as a sentimentalist, or worse, condemned as being against progress. Urban preservation came low on the list of priorities of governments scrambling to build modern nations. After spending budgets on better infrastructure and social programs, there was often little left for restoration work. And with big fortunes to be made in real estate, old neighborhoods were razed to make way for characterless high-rises. Highways rolled out across cityscapes.