Tokyo Blog

There’s nothing cooler than speeding through a neon-dripped Tokyo night in one of these taxis, now a metropolitan icon in its own right. The immaculately clean interior and exterior and driver-operated automatic doors enhance what is already a very Japanese experience. Doilies on the seats and the driver’s white gloves betray the Japanese obsession with hygiene.

If you’re wondering where you’ve seen one before, Bob Harris has a similar neon retinal burnout experience in the opening scene of Lost In Translation whilst riding/sleeping in the back of one of these vehicles, before swinging into the Park Hyatt Hotel in Shinjuku. Riding in a Crown Classic is one of those cultural experiences that lies outside the gamut of usual Tokyo sightseeing, and should be on the to-do list of anyone planning to visit.

BTW: I ate at the restaurant and drank at the bar in the Park Hyatt Tokyo, featured in Lost In Translation, and the views at night from the floor-to-ceiling windows are amazing. I don’t know why I didn’t blog it then, it was a pretty long time ago now.