Megalopolis?

According to this Wikipedia page Tokyo is a megalopolis. Japan, however, think of it as a metropolis. I, one of the forty million human inhabitants of this area, even temporary, can't make up my mind (and maybe I don't even want to), too soon: three days in the midst of this highly organized hive is too little to understand anything about it.

Walking around in it, though, of Tokyo, I understood the smallness, in a sense. Outside the areas of skyscrapers, which though there are, but, barring exceptions, of moderate size; beyond the skyscrapers, I was saying, there are urban areas made up of small buildings, tiny activities, even hundred-year-old ones, which you almost struggle to enter, passing sideways between the stacked stories, almost miniatures, perhaps dioramas.

I saw one just yesterday, of a diorama: it was taken from the only photo of a stationery store that was a store in the early 1900s and is now a stationery shop-palace, albeit a narrow one, twelve stories high. Maybe it feels that way, as I feel now, to shrink down and sneak into a diorama. I have a feeling, after all, of being in an anthill whose end I cannot see. In some ways, within a certain amount, it is reassuring.

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I did understand one thing, though: in Tokyo you get around by train, and it's easy, because of the technology. The subway is a dense network, enveloping the city, made up of trains that run above and below ground and even at street level-I've seen level crossings.

Getting around Tokyo requires a connection, with Google Maps or something similar on it. But the organization of the subway is extremely sensible even for an ordinary human brain: the lines have a name, an abbreviation of a couple of letters that resemble the full name, and also a color, which to me, generally, is of no use. Then each stop has a name, in Japanese, of course, but always given in Western characters as well. And, most importantly, they have a number: get on at TS05, change to KS06, and finally get off at KS10. Riding the first few trains, it gets pretty easy. You enter by swiping your phone over one of the thousand turnstiles and swipe it again on the way out: the bill is made on a pay-as-you-go, rechargeable card, which I did in digital-only form: the shortage of chips made it difficult to find physical cards.