Tokyo Tower 1964

For my birthday last year a friend of mine got me an issue of National Geographic from 1964. The lead story was about Tokyo and its getting ready for the olympics. There was lots of facts about how big Tokyo was, how it's growing fantastically, and so on. Of course, being National Geographic, it's full of some amazing pictures. Like this one, of the recently completed Tokyo Tower. Look at all the empty land around it!

Now take a look at this picture I took from the top of Tokyo Tower in 2004, 40 years later. It's all been built up. Where Tokyo Tower once dwarfed the land around it, now it's just another tall weed in a field of spiky grass.

Pretty soon, the tower (333 meters) will look absolutely quaint when compared to the 610-meter-tall New Tokyo Tower when it's completed in 2011.

Ah, progress.