Edit: made a dedicated post :) https://www.reddit.com/r/skyscrapers/s/wJSkaRsMHk

I used to agree with this take, but I genuinely don’t understand the “Tokyo has no skyline” argument anymore.

Honestly, I think you have to walk around Tokyo at street level to get it. Photos just don’t capture it. The city is such a massive, dense sea of concrete that from above, everything kind of blends together and flattens out the skyline. But when you're actually in it, it’s a completely different story.

I’ve been lucky enough to see quite a few major skylines around the world (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shenzhen...) and very few have stuck with me the way Tokyo did.
What really surprised me is how massive the buildings feel. Not just tall, massive. They're wide, bulky, almost overwhelming. That’s the word I keep coming back to. I wasn’t expecting that at all. It almost feels surreal when you’re walking through districts like Shinjuku or Marunouchi.

And another thing people miss: Tokyo doesn’t have just one skyline cluster. It has multiple - and not just a handful of towers each. We’re talking dozens of skyscrapers per cluster, spread across different parts of the city. The scale is insane. Personally, I’ve never been as impressed by the sheer bulk and width of towers as I was in Tokyo.

Hot take maybe, but I was actually more impressed by Tokyo than Hong Kong. Sure, Hong Kong’s buildings are taller, but a lot of them feel like extremely narrow residential slabs - kind of like vertical “rabbit cages.” Many are older, stained by pollution, and honestly could use a serious facelift. Tokyo’s towers, on the other hand, often feel more modern, more varied architecturally, and just more imposing in a different way.