By working in contact with the students of the lab, I had the occasion to know and speak with other professors interested in the same case I was studying. In particular I got in contact with professor Hidenobu Jinnai, a professor of History, at the Hosei University, who, from that moment on, I regularly met to show him the work in progress analysis.

The workshop was an occasion to be introduced inside the university environment, what I did not expect was to discover another face of the Tokyo city that I was used to know. This was not my first time in Tokyo, and in Japan in general, I had already been there during the 1 “edition of the TTT workshop and when I was younger, I was used to follow my father in his working travels to Tokyo and Osaka. During the field excursion around in the historical districts that the workshop treated, I found myself discovering a completely different city from the one I was used to know. This was not made of the super-crowded roads of Shibuya, there were no neon-light advertisings on the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, which were all so different in details, but looked so similar. Here, just some blocks away from the major street, I could find a human-scale city, a smaller Tokyo, where a slower urban and social environment was apparently still alive. This became a turning point of my experience and from that moment on I decided to shift there the studies of my thesis, to focus my efforts on understanding this little fragment of the city, how they have survived on the redevelopments of the city, and how they could be a further alternative to the big scale Tokyo.