JACKIE Chan has scored quite a coup with his new movie, Shinjuku Incident, in which he plays an illegal Chinese immigrant in the yakuza underworld.
The film by Hong Kong director Derek Yee is set in the shady Shinjuku district of Tokyo of the 1990s and is filmed on location - quite a feat since permission to film there is hard to obtain from the city authorities.
But to foreign eyes - both Eastern and Western - the urbanity of Tokyo holds a fascinating mystique which represents alienation, loneliness and good old culture shock.
The landscape of the city is rich and varied, and many of its 23 districts, called wards, have gained identities of their own through the movies.
my paper takes a look at a few noteworthy areas.
Shinjuku Tokyo district which contains the highest number of foreigners of any community. A 2005 count estimated just over 29,000 non-Japanese of 107 nationalities, which makes it ideal for a Chinese immigrant story like Shinjuku Incident (2009).
Kabukicho Pulsating red-light and entertainment area with nightclubs, bars, love hotels and seedy, gang-controlled joints. In the 2000 thriller Tokyo Raiders, a smiling, prancing Tony Leung Chiu Wai fights a bunch of thugs with an umbrella in a street scene set here.
Scene from the movie Tokyo Raiders
Park Hyatt Tokyo Hotel The hotel where older man Bill Murray and young chick Scarlett Johansson stays in Lost In Translation (2003). Shinjuku Park Tower, the second-highest building in Shinjuku, houses the bar in which Murray and Johansson meet.
Scene from Lost in Translation [Photo: Focus Features]
Hachiko Square Crossing The famous pedestrian crossing located near the Shibuya train station. Featured in Lost In Translation, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift and documentary film Baraka (1992). A statue of Hachiko, a dog which waited for its dead master at the train station for over 10 years, sits near the site. An American adaptation called Hachiko: A Dog's Story, starring Richard Gere, is in the works.
Harajuku Fancy-dress capital of Japan, where people dress up in cosplay, punk, gothic Lolita and visual kei (flamboyant rock-star costumes) styles. In the quirky comedy Kamikaze Girls (2004), a girl dressed like Little Bo Peep from a rural Japanese village yearns to reach this hotspot of outlandish fashion.
Street cafes, boutiques, restaurants and shops line the busy streets of Harajuku in Tokyo
Minato Bridge
Landmark suspension bridge across Tokyo Bay. Seen in Lost In Translation and in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol 1 (2003), when Lucy Liu and her gang go to the House of Blue Leaves (actually a set constructed in Beijing) for a big showdown.
Ginza Tokyo's most neon-lit shopping belt with department stores such as Matsuya, Mitsukoshi, and Wako. It inspired The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola to make a glitzy 1982 movie called One From The Heart, although he changed the location to Las Vegas.
