Tokyo Solamachi

This guide to Tokyo Solamachi, at the foot of the Skytree in Tokyo's Sumida district, opens with an engineering problem: by the early 2000s new skyscrapers were blocking Tokyo Tower's digital broadcast signal from reaching homes across the region. It follows the decision to build somewhere taller in an unlikely working-class neighborhood, construction beginning in 2008, and the shopping town of restaurants, an aquarium and a planetarium that grew up at its base. Listen for the wordplay worked into the tower's height, a nod to the old name for the land beneath it.