The Heart of Tokyo

I was at Shibuya briefly today. I tried to meet someone here. We didn't succeed.
 There are 32 million people in Tokyo's greater metropolitan area (city+suburbs). That's almost as much as all of Canada combined. Just the city of Tokyo on its own stands at a whopping 13 million people, almost twice as much as the province of Quebec as a whole, and ten times as many people as there are in Montreal. Every street looks like Ste-Catherine on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
 Though I've been to Shibuya a couple of times, I'm always impressed at the sheer mass of human bodies lining the sidewalks.
If I'm not mistaken, Shibuya has the world's most crowded intersection. That's the one pictured on the left. It baffles me.




One of the better known meeting spots in Shibuya is the statue of the dog, Hachiko, cast in bronze. Hachiko was a dog from the 20's who met his owner every day for a year and a half at the same exact time at the end of every day, near the Shibuya station where his statue now stands. One day, though, Hachiko's owner died of a fatal stroke and didn't make it to the usual meeting location. None the less, Hachiko waited at the designated location. And wait he did, returning to the very same spot at the same time for the next nine years, until the dog himself died of a cancer. Hachiko's story has captured the hearts of the Japanese, and is to this day referred to as a symbol of undying devotion and loyalty.